Blog Post Assignment #3

Peer Editing at Its Finest
In the video What is Peer Editing? and the tutorial Peer Edit with Perfection Tutorial , we are informed of what peer editing is and how you do it. Peer editing is editing work that your peers, people the same age as you, have done in class. Editing means correcting a student's work to rid it of mistakes and make it a better quality. Three things have to be done in order to make peer editing effective.
1. Compliments: Complimenting someone's work means to praise all the things that your peer done right in their assignment. This could be their use of wording, creativity, and topic.
2. Suggestions: Making suggestions on someone's work means to tell them what you think they should have done to make their assignment more effective. Suggestions can be made on their word choice, the flow of their assignment, and their use of details.
3. Corrections: Making corrections on someone's work means to make sure their assignment is free of mistakes. Corrections can be made on punctuation, spelling, and incomplete or run-on sentences.
Peer editing can be a great tool to use in the elementary classrooms. This way students can learn from their mistakes and learn how to catch mistakes in other student's work. Although this can be such a great learning tool, teachers and fellow classmates may come across a "Mean Margaret" or a "Picky Patty". In the video Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes, students critique their fellow classmates work. They provide a cute video of what NOT to do whenever you are peer editing someone's work. Take for instance someone may become a "Mean Margaret" and be completely hateful towards their peer while editing their work. Others may become a "Picky Patty" and be so picky on the little errors and not worry about the big errors. Don't get me wrong all errors matter! If a teacher decided to let their students peer edit their classmate's work this would be a great video to show before they started.

Using Technology in Special Education Classes
In the YouTube video, Technology in Special Education, a teacher explains why and how using technology in a special education setting is important. Students with special needs have difficulty in not just their regular life, but their school life as well. Learning and doing school work come as a challenge for them because some students may not can talk, write, hear, or see. Using technology in the special education classroom made the students more eager to learn, because learning was so much easier for them.
Laptops provided a way for the students who could not speak to communicate with their teacher. A student who could not speak nor write was able to use a special clicker attached to his wheelchair and computer to type messages to his teacher. This also allowed him to finish his assignments. Another student that could not see small text had a special program installed on his laptop that zoomed in on the text, which allowed him to read his lessons. Allowing special needs students to participate in classroom lessons and get educated will allow them to be successful in the real world. Also by incorporating technology into their classroom they will know how to operate computers and possibly become smarter than a normal person whenever it comes to using technology.
Any teacher can be faced with a special needs student in their class. I learned from a personal experience ,while I was substituting at an elementary school, that having a iPad close by helped a special needs student feel important. This student was not on the grade level with her classmates, so that meant she could not complete any of the work that was presented to her. I allowed her to play educational games on the iPad that allowed her to work on things that she knew how to do. This allowed her to feel like she was "smart" in her own way.
iPad, Academics, and Autism- How Do They Work Together?
After watching the video How the iPad Works with Academics for Autism, you should be able to answer the question "How Do They Work Together?". It is truly amazing how these different items work together. The iPad contributes a way of presenting academics to children with autism in a unique way. First of all we all need to give props to Apple for contributing this aspect to education and families with special needs children. Using the iPad allows children with autism to get automatic feedback whenever they are counting, reading, or spelling. This is great because these kids do not have a long attention span for focusing on daily lessons. Plus this is a great way to keep them entertained. Apple provides several "apps" for parents and teachers to choose from to help their children learn.
I found an app on the Apple website that I would use if I had a child at home or in my classroom that had autism. This app is called Memory Train. Memory Train allows children to look at shapes and remember which shape goes where. I would use this app for a math skills game and just a fun game within itself. This app would make children focus on what shape they saw and where it went. After choosing this app I read the customer reviews and found several great reviews. One customer wrote, "This is a great memory app. My daughter has autism and This app forces her to focus. Also, She's waaay better than me at this!!".
Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts By: Vicki Davis
After watching this video I have a new concept on teaching. Vicki Davis states in this video, "that to be a teacher you do not have to know everything!" We learn something new everyday. In this video she let her students learn to how navigate around "Teraform" and they had to teach her what to do. They changed their avatars and communicated with each other in this virtual world.
Davis shows and allows her students to work with the new technology that we are presented with today. She teaches them how to blog effectively, use Google docs, and interact with children around the world. Even though her classroom is in rural Georgia her students are connected with students from all over the world. These students can participate in assignments together and interact with each other from just a click of a mouse.