Blog Post #3

Peer Editing
I have been in both advanced creative writing courses and Journalism clubs throughout middle and high school. These opportunities made peer reviews(both giving and receiving) pretty common place. However, from the three resources that were made available to me, I learned a couple of new things

I feel that the most important thing that I learned was that in each peer review you need to maintain positivity while still being able to look at the paper with an objective lens. The students in the video showed how important it was to stay on track and also to look at your peer as a fellow writer not as a friend, the also took a funny approach to some of the most common errors and made it enjoyable to watch
From all three sources I learned how even if someone put full effort into a peer edit, if they lacked specific instructions, then the efforts were pointless.

Special Education; Technological Help!
The form of Special Education I feel interested in and drawn towards is the field of physical disabilities. The video we watch touches on one major physical disability that often gets over looked when compared to blindness and deafness, muteness.

The ability to speak is something so many of us take for granted. Both with the ability to type written messages and also(this was not in the video but it made me think) make those written messages into verbal messages through the technology of voice simulators can allow an entire group of students who are perfectly intelligent enough to survive schooling,communicate that intelligence!

Apple assists with Autism
I have to admit, I am a skeptic so when I first started watching this video and exploring this topic I assumed that like so many other things in this society this was a clever attempt to make parents with autistic children(desperate for learning options) have false hope and buy into this technology....I did a little research outside of this video and I have to say....I was wrong.

Children are using this technology invented to be a luxury item and in doing so they are losing so many of the handicaps that slow them down from the "regular kids". The video point out so many reasons why it worked but in my opinion the main reason the technology was so amazing is the IMMEDIATE positive(or negative) reinforcement. The children strive to hear the "BING" that means they guessed the number, letter or even planet right so not only do they stay focused but the auditory and visual repetition allows them to store it to memory without even trying to!

I can see so many ways the technology can be used and many, many different subjects it could be applied to. The one I chose was foreign language, this would of course be for any language as well, but the Ipad option would allow speaking, hearing and seeing the words all at once.

Ana Lomba’s Spanish for Kids [Ana Lomba Early Languages LLC, $3.99; fee intro title] is a collection of individual apps, each featuring a classic story designed to engage children and parents in learning Spanish together. The stories use voice-over by native-speaking actresses and include text in both Spanish and English to aid in comprehension.
This app would help not only in Spanish Language recognition but also in basic reading comprehension skills.