| Scoping Made Affordable (SMA) |
| Why Pick SMA for Your Scoping Training? During my first year of scoping, I spent a lot of time with scraped knees and bruised elbows, so to speak. I quickly discovered that I needed to know so much more to become successful in the field of scoping. Teaching anything requires a balance of both experience and rapport with students. I give my students both because of my previous teaching experience and successful scoping business. Both my students and my court reporters have discovered my reputation of reliability and communication. Both are key to any successful business Most importantly, a positive attitude will carry you miles. A negative attitude simply brings everyone around you down. My success is dependent upon your success. |
| Your Instructor's Background |
| Devon Roberts New Hampton, Iowa Early Childhood Education (B.S. from Iowa State University) Worked with a contractor and established the first day care center (Great Plays Day Care Center) for infants through 10 year olds in New Hampton, IA (It's still in operation today.) Family and Parental interactions (ECE consulting with 15 communities and libraries) Written material (ECE Promotional material and website building) Literacy (ECE brochures for parents, creating programs, curriculum development, educating daycare providers) Grant Writing Medical Transcription Certification Psychology Mental Health Scoping November 2006 – Present Joyful Scoping Owner Email: drscoping@gmail.com |
And so much more........
know that I will always be available to you. |
| What qualifies SMA to teach scoping and ways SMA will continue to excel in this industry? My background is in the teaching field. I've taught all ages over many years and different settings. Most of my teaching has been with young children, youth and day care providers, librarians, and many church educational programs. In one of my previous positions, I was consulting with 15 libraries to create programs to foster literacy skills in 0 - 5 year-old children to promote their school readiness skills. My training programs are designed to give you the skills you need, not waste your time, and make you feel confident in your abilities. I have a great enthusiasm for learning and want to show others how easy it is to: Market yourself, learn how to upload and download files, how to build resources for yourself, how to network in the scoping world, and love the career you have chosen. Over the past two years of training scopists and now nearly four years of scoping myself, I have become so comfortable with the various punctuation rules and how they are used within this field. And because of my background in education, it is necessary for students to review the punctuation rules, apply them and to have them checked to be assured that the rules are being applied appropriately. Just giving a student the "edited" version of a file upon completion does not show them the rules behind mistakes. SMA provides that to each student especially throughout the transcript evaluation process. I strive to always increase the curriculum to enable all students to be as informed as possible. If you still wonder about my "teaching" abilities in this field, feel free to contact any of the graduates of SMA on that page of this website. The number of students who enroll in SMA continues to increase while the number of quality-trained scopists in the field also continues to increase. SMA's goal in teaching scopists is to improve both the quality and quantity of scopists court reporters are working with. My goal is not to see how many students I can push through this program. SMA's success is dependent upon their success. |
| SMA will proofread your work behind you making you a confident scopist at the beginning of your career!! |
| You will get to network with other scopists and scoping students through weekly conference calls. |
| Since this is a self-paced program, you learn the material however it fits into your schedule. And SMA will be here for you well into your scoping career. There is no ending deadline. |
Because Joyful Scoping continues to have more work than it can handle, you will have no problem finding work by using SMA's step-by-step marketing plan. Joyful Scoping is in the trenches with you on a day-to-day basis. |
| SMA's goal is to save you money wherever it can. That is so important in today's economy. |
| SMA will help you learn the various hyperkeys or shortcuts to your program so when you start working, you'll be editing at a reasonable speed to start with. |
| SMA never expected to have scopists training from other programs participate in its weekly conference calls. Due to that, SMA began its scoping intern program which continues to grow. |
| Why do I love scoping and teaching? Because I think I've probably learned more in the past three years than I did when I began in 2006. I love the flexibility of my schedule and really have the best of both worlds. I get to work independently and get to interact with others. And I love helping women become strong and competent in a career that they love also. |
| How SMA prepares You and Your Brain for Your New Career For those of you who don’t know me, my background is in education. Because I spent many years learning and applying how our brains work, I bring to scoping the understanding of how our brains can be trained to learn to scope. Most people who are entering the field of scoping (both men and women) are in a middle-aged bracket or even approaching their senior years of living. Scoping fits many different people at different stages in their life. And regardless of when one begins scoping, each of us brings a unique repertoire of experience which can only help us in our scoping work. Because many who are entering the scoping field are at least in the middle or later stages in life, they may not have been using the basic skills of the English language and punctuation for many years and their last experience in working with those skills was in high school or college. Well, anyone who has knowledge of how the brain works and how it does not work will have full awareness that those skills will need to be revisited, studied and put into practice before that person can become a qualified scopist. I feel this lack of awareness is a detriment to prospective students who may be misled in thinking that it’s just like riding a bicycle. Even though you haven’t done it for years, once you hop on it, it all comes back easily. If only that were the case. There is a common phrase used in the field of brain development that says “use it or lose it.” If one does not use the skills, the brain, in its processes in efficiency, will slowly eliminate those synapses which were established when we were being taught that information in high school and college. In this case, most adults entering the scoping field will need to relearn some of the basic English language and punctuation skills in order to recall how they function but also need to learn them as they apply to the court reporting world, as Ms. Lillian Morson has done so well in her Lillian Morson’s English Guide for Court Reporters. She profoundly recognized the need for this kind of guidance in working with the spoken word, which as most scopists and court reporters know, often needs to be punctuated a bit differently based on the tone and pace in which those words were spoken in comparison to a standard written paper for history class. So studying those rules of guidance and applying them are necessary steps to becoming a successful scopist. But there is another step that is of equal importance that is oftentimes overlooked in the training process. This is a process that becomes two-fold. One is the ability to listen carefully to the audio-recorded information that often accompanies the work scopists do. Unless one has been a transcriptionist for years, most of us do not have that ability to listen for the little things. It has to be taught and captured. Some may argue that court reporters that require scopists to listen to the audio recording word for word simply use the recording as a crutch. Personally, in my experience with many official court reporters, I’ve found that the court reporter wants to provide the best work possible and willingly accepts his/her limitations. Those reporters desire the best possible transcript imaginable and are likely an overachiever in life. They become very good at what they do and are recognized for their level of professionalism presented through their work. I feel that that is to be commended and appreciated. The second critical part in this learning process is the ability to read contextually, reading for content, in other words. In our hurried pace of life, we think we’ve mastered this skill but too often have to relearn this skill as most of us have not performed this skill of looking for the tiny details. This particular skill is unique for the middle-age or senior adult because by this time our brains have become so patterned to “think” what is supposed to be there which in reality is not what the written text was recorded as. For instance, when you take the common phrase in transcript dialogue of “for the record,” more times than not, the new scopist will not be able to detect the “the” missing in this text: for record. The “the” is missing but our brain tries to tell us it is there. So, in essence, we have to create those synapses or connections and put them into practice to increase that skill. It is not necessarily a skill that comes overnight. These two skills, listening for detail and reading contextually, have to be taught and mastered in order to become a successful scopist. So if you happen to be a recently trained scopist and feel that you are struggling in your new profession, you may need to practice up on those two particular skills. Once you have mastered them and know how the English language functions and how to apply punctuation based upon that knowledge, you will be successful for the rest of your scoping career. Animal studies show that the structure of the brain changes with experience. Based on imaging experiments in people, we also know that the ability to use parts of our brain changes over time. People who learn how to play the violin, for instance, have different brain connections than people who don't play that instrument. And as people become expert at playing music (or another such skill), the theory is that their brains become more efficient and use less "bandwidth," so to speak, for that task. |
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