Blog Post #3

Peer Editing:

When we are reading our peers work, we must remember not to be ugly when correcting them. It's called constructive criticism, nicely make helpful suggestions that will help your peers. We must remember that we are future educators and that our students will need this same help from us. When you are rude or make a snide comment it can quickly dishearten a person and could have a very negative impact on their learning. We all make mistakes, we are human! Sometimes when we write and even proofread our work something can be overlooked. I am terrible about run-on sentences and try to read over my work before hand but it is almost inevitable that one will slip by me. So let's all remember to make nice, helpful suggestions when we are peer editing! :)

Writing Peer Review Top Ten Mistakes

Peer editing can be good at times, bad in other situations. I actually had a similar problem recently at work; I was asked to correct mistakes from a co-worker/friend of mine of equal status, and it caused friction between the two of us. Even though I wasn't editing really, it was the same principal behind it. So I can definitely identify with some of the cons.

The person that is being edited must have an open mind to mistakes and ways in which they can improve. This is a lot harder for adults to take than children, in my opinion. Children it is all in the wording, if you make it sound like that was great but it can get even better when you do this....they take it as they still did a good job and will listen to suggestions.

It's Not about the Technology

Mrs. Hines made GREAT points in this post. She talked about the fact that technology is useless without an innovative teacher to use it effectively. This is so true. I have had a handful of teachers in the past year that have had that whiteboard sitting behind them and never turned it on. We basically memorized our material and burped it back out. I remember just a selective amount of knowledge from those classes. It would have taken just a little effort and knowledge about that whiteboard to make the class more interesting and had us more involved to retain the knowledge of that particular class.

In my classroom, I am going to use every resource I can to be an effective teacher! If one student learns better one way, that's when you make adjustments to accommodate that student. It's not by the book because every child is different, technology can help because there are so many different avenues that can be taken.

Technologically Illiterate?

After reading this blog, I completely agree with everything Mr. Fisch says. There is no excuse for a teacher not to be able to use a computer and the basic day to day programs. If they don't, they need to learn or find a new job. Kids today are going to need a teacher that can use technology, our world now works and relies greatly on it!

I also completely agree on the order of the times that he mentioned. It was acceptable in the first part of the 20th century to not be able to read and write, and at the beginning of the 21st century it was acceptable but getting harder to not be technologically literate. This is a strong message to educators, our kids in the classroom must have this knowledge in order to succeed when they are old enough to start college and step out into their careers.

Gary Hayes Social Media Count

I am not going to lie, when I went to the link and the first thing I saw was that counter going crazy, my first thought was this is really important in a lot of peoples lives. The growth that social media has had is amazing, I wish I could have been the inventor of it! It grows and grows every second, every minute, every hour, of everyday! We as teachers need to use this to our advantage, however, we need to be cautious on how we use it. We have all seen how some teachers can get carried away and make some not so smart choices.

Social media can be extremely helpful in communicating with our parents, community, and colleagues. We can successfully involve parents that work and are unable to be involved as much as they want to be, we can share ideas and let the community in on different things that our class is contributing to within the community, and get new ideas from other educators from all over the world!

A vision of Students Today

My take on this video is that technology is a growing importance at every level of education. The textbooks really hit a nerve to me, teachers have infinite amounts of information that can fit into what their lesson plans and goals of the class are. Universities are doing better about using these tools, but I can tell you right now I spent $300 on a book that was never opened and was bought back for less than $100.

I also have problems with the amount of debt that occurs with college students, for some it will be 10 maybe upwards to 20 YEARS for them to get out of this! It is a problem, this means they step out into the real world and first off accrue more debt because their parents are done paying for insurance, living expenses, etc. Then they start a family, get into more debt and create a growing problem for their own children and it becomes a seriously vicious cycle.