Blog Post 3

Peer Editing,Tutorial Peer Editing, and Writing Peer Review Top 10 Mistakes are three videos and slide show presentations that deal with helping people become better peer editors. Peer editing is something that almost everyone has attempted at least a few times throughout school with varying degrees of success. From personal experience, it seems that often people view peer reviewing as a way to quickly exit class quickly, but these videos and power points attempt to provide some tips to turn peer editing into a useful tool. Some of the tips are quite useful, but for the most part they are things that most people already know.

In my opinion peer editing can be extremely useful for certain small errors like typing errors and things of that nature, but it is limited when it comes to major errors like organization and content. As a future English teacher, I hope to employ some type of peer editing in my classroom, but I also don't want students to solely rely on each other to correct errors. I hope to help students individually at least part of the time to further their writing ability.

Technology in Special Education
Technology in Special Education is a phenomenal video that shows the ways in which some pretty basic technology can do wonders for special needs children. Last year I visited a school in Mobile designed to educate special needs children most of whom were non verbal and needed a great deal of assistance to accomplish most tasks. The people that worked there were some of the most patient and generous people I have ever met, but often they simply did not have the proper tools for helping these children out. Most of the "technology" at the school I visited was probably from the early nineties. A few simple computers could have done wonders for these kids, but most likely the funding simply wasn't available.

Obviously this video was a great representation of the positive effects that technology can have in the lives of special needs kids. If or when I have special needs kids in my class I would love to be able to implement some of this technology to help them better understand the material and also help them communicate better.

"Sound Amp r" is a simple app that could be very useful in a classroom setting for students with mild hearing difficulty. It would be perfect for someone who possibly didn't have a significant enough hearing problem to require a hearing aid but did need a little enhancement of the sounds of a lesson.

Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts

Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts is a video that features Vicki Davis, a Georgia high school teacher who implements a great deal of technology in her classroom. Her classroom seems like an environment where a great deal of interconnectivity takes place. Her students learn about a number of tools that will help them throughout their lives. Much of this is possible because of the setup of her classroom, which contains a ton of computers and Smartboards.

Most of the activities she seems to require of her students wouldn't have a place in an English classroom, but the blogging aspect of the class is definitely something I could implement into my classroom. Often young writers struggle with the notion of an audience and either write for themselves or to attempt to impress a teacher. Blogging is a great tool for helping students learn to write for a wider audience. I would love to add some type of blogging assignments to the writing curriculum in my classroom.