Blog Post #3: Peer Editing

The question of the week is "What is peer editing?" As stated on Colby College, "Peer editing can be a confidence builder to those writers who are insecure about their own writing". Peer editing can also be described as a way to check a peers work on the grounds of a positive learning environment. The main way to help a classmate or peer is to use compliments or suggestions. These suggestions can be over the types of word choice, organization, sentence structure, and the flow of the topic throughout the peers work. After watching What is Peer Editing? I learned that you are critiquing a peers work. This means that this person is your own age. So while critiquing it is important to keep in mind that not only do they make mistakes, but you do to. Why be mean when you know if someone was mean to you, you would be hurt also? When peer editing the main goal is to stay positive by using compliments and helpful criticism. Instead of saying that your peers work is horrible and being rude, you can say that they need to use better word usage and sentence structure. From my own experience with teachers and fellow classmates, people believe that to get better you need to be broken down. This is not the way that I see helpful. I have been broken down many times to believe that the only way to help someone is to build them up and be productive with your criticism. 

While looking over the slideshow, Peer Edit with Perfection Tutorial, I learned that there are three steps to peer editing. The three steps are using compliments, making suggestions, and helping with corrections. By making a rubric to use when peer editing is a helpful way to stay on topic. Ask yourself if they used good word choice, added helpful details, used their organization skills to make it easy to read, and if they stayed on topic. Help your peer by checking for spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, run on and incomplete sentences, and punctuation mistakes. The video Writing Peer Review is a funny video on the right and wrongs of peer reviewing from the mean, loud, and just plain uncaring. The students show the different scenarios of how peer editing can go wrong in a classroom. I think this video will be a great way to show my class what not to do when peer editing and be more helpful to each other.

What Will Teaching in the 21st Century be Like? Blog Post #2

Mr. Dancealot
The central message of the video is that even though Mr. Dancealot may be able to teach someone how to dance if he does not let the students actually participate in the lesson they will never be able to learn. When the final test came and the teacher left the students to look at their notes and figure out how to dance without any instruction. This proved that the students had not learned how to dance from the class, because they did not get the chance to actually practice the moves with the teacher there to correct them. Just like with any sport or instrument, practice makes perfect and that is the same for dancing. I believe that to be able to understand something, you must be able to experience it for yourself, which the students were not able to do. I agree the author on the idea that without a structured plan, or syllabus, the class will not be productive.

Teaching in the 21st Century
Kevin Robert's short movie, Teaching in the 21st Century, focuses on the growth of technology in the lives of the students. The teacher's job is to be able to understand what the students are using to find their knowledge and show the students the ways to verify and use the information that is easily handed to them through Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and various other websites that cater to the databasing of information, whether it be correct or fabricated. However, Mr. Robert is not saying that technology should not be allowed in the learning environment, but harnessed in order to be used as an advantage to the teachers. The job of a teacher has changed from the database to the filter of unwanted and unneeded information. A teacher is supposed to guide the student to learn and find the answers on their own. When I was in class my teachers always told us to learn what was in our books, which sometimes would not even apply to our future daily lives. Mr. Robert asked at the fairly beginning of the movie a question that should be asked to almost everyone, "Where do I get reliable news?". I think this is an amazing question, because students today are believing everything that they hear from peers, Facebook, and Twitter, when they should be taught how to look up the actual newspapers websites. Kevin Roberts approach to teaching is one that should be taught to everyone that will be teaching 21st century students.

Networked Student
"Why does a networked students even need a teacher?" This is the question asked at the end of the movie after you, as a viewer, watch the student start the class and expand his knowledge of the American Psyche through the different resources that he found through wikis and blogs. The reason he needed a teacher was because his teacher was the one who showed him how to set up his network, how to verify the websites reliability, and how to share his own knowledge with others on his own blog. Without his teacher, the student would have been lost in the sea of knowledge that is technology. This is also relevant to any type of teacher that helps to guide his or her students what to learn and what not to learn. Teachers are the building blocks of education, because without teachers to help guide the students, the students would never succeed.

Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts
The idea of Davis' video is to show how technology can be used to connect students all over the world and that while technology is in some schools taboo, in Davis' classroom she encourages her students to use every bit of technology they have to better themselves. Her students have set up blogs, just like we are doing, to communicate with other students in different schools, such as the schools in the middle east. Davis' points out the fact that all students are curious and while she may have to explain some words or ideas to her students, she expects them all to Google what they do not know and learn more than what she has given them. Her students even taught Davis' how to terraform, which she states that she did not know how to do until her students had taught her. While she is a full time student, the fact that she has helped to set up two international programs to educate students in technology and more about the connectivity that it provides is completely astounding!

Who's Ahead In The Learning Race?
My answer would have to be third graders, because of the access they have to the Macs and iPads. Two days with a Mac and the third graders could already use iMovie and myself, as an undergraduate, have never even opened iMovie on my Macbook Pro. On my first class of EDM 310, I felt like I had accomplished something because I had a Mac and I can use it fairly well, but seeing those third graders use programs I did not even know existed make me embarrassed. However, when I was a third grader I remember going into the computer lab and doing my typing lessons and playing The Oregon Trail. That is the extent of technology from when I was in elementary school. Seeing students with the eagerness and drive to learn more about technology is very inspiring to me. I feel like I need to advance with technology as third grade students are so I will be better adapt to teaching in a technologically advanced school.

Flipping the Classroom
Before watching this video, I had no idea what the process of "flipping" a classroom could be. After watching more about the idea of giving students the lesson before teaching it to them the next day, I think that this would be useful, but also extremely time consuming. Using this idea would be productive if the lesson was extremely in-depth and would need extra time to have the students process the concept. While I do not think I will be using this idea in my classroom at all times, I can see the advantages of giving the students the lesson before hand if needed. 

Blog Post #1: What about EDM310?

I have heard good and bad things before starting this semester with EDM310 in my schedule. Most were more of warning than of bad statements about this class. One of my close friends warned me that if I did not have the time to commit to this class than I might want to wait to take the class. Some people told me that once the class was over with I would get the same feeling of accomplishment that they got from the class, which compelled me to continue on with the commitment of EDM310. That decision was not without fears of not being able to commit and use my time management to the maximum. The course load is so tremendous that a feeling of being overwhelmed is my main feeling in this first week.

EDM310 compared to my other classes while being in college is on a different level. The other classes I have taken so far in my career as a student do not compare to EDM310 in terms of course load, challenging, and overall excitement at learning all that I can learn from my professor, Dr. Lomax, the lab assistants, and my fellow classmates. The most difficult thing about this class that scares me down to the core is not being able to learn all that I can learn in this semester and taking the knowledge that I acquire onto my own teaching career. The way I plan on combatting this fear is to take notes, keep all the information that is given to me and plan to return back to the information when I feel like I have learned so much that I can not seem to remember anything.

A few questions I still have about EDM310 would have to be how to use a smart board, even though I know from a friend, who took this class last semester, that I would soon be a master at using a smart board and all of the programs that we learn about in class. When I was in elementary school, the most exciting part of the day was when we got to go to the board, which must be much more exciting for student in schools today when they are able to use such a technologically advanced piece of equipment.

Practice Blog Post #1

• Who am I?
• Junior at South
• Corpus to Jackson; Private to Public
• Southern Miss. to USA
• Cooper, NICU
• Why do I want to be an educator?
• My original plan
• Private to Public
• Second Grade
• My Passions
• My Family

Who am I? I, Megan Shoultz, am a Junior in the Elementary Education program at the University of South Alabama. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, I attended Corpus Christi Catholic School, but got a public school experience when I transferred to Causey Middle School around 6th grade. My high school was Murphy High School, but I moved to Jackson, Alabama around my Junior year and attended Jackson High School. After I graduated from JHS in 2012, I attended the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi for two semesters before transferring back to Mobile and the University of South Alabama. The main reason I moved back to Mobile and closer to my family is the birth of my little brother, Cooper Bentley Shoultz, who was premature and admitted into the NICU at USA Women's and Children's Hospital. Being closer to my family, who was staying at the Ronald McDonald House to be closer to Cooper, was a great incentive to the idea of coming back to Mobile. When I first started to attend South, my degree plan was on the path of Criminal Justice and had the dreams of becoming either a police officer or a lawyer.

While my original plan was to become an lawyer or something along those lines, my dream when I was a child was to be a teacher. And armed with the experiences form being both in private and public school systems, I have shaped my ideas on teaching and I hope to draw from both of the experiences to better teach the children of this generation. One of the main reasons, I want to be an educator because of my experiences as a student myself in second grade. I want to help children learn the way my teachers helped me. An educator is meant to guide and help students learn and grow throughout the school year. With the changes of the 21st century, teaching has had to evolve along with technology, which has lead to the growing use of computers and iPads in the classrooms of an elementary school. 

While studying to become a certified teacher at the University of South Alabama, I would like to be able to expand my knowledge of not only teaching methods that are used around Mobile or Alabama but throughout the world and the different types of strategies that would help a student excel. Along with my goal of becoming a teacher being one of my passions, I also hold an enormous part of my heart to my family and my boyfriend (pictured below).