Internets, oh the joy, oh the anxiety.

This reflection will primarily focus on good ol' reliable Wikipedia as well as all the technological items I didn't know of, thought were amazing, or want to us within my classroom. To start off, since I can remember, we have always been told Don't use Wikipedia. IT'S NOT RELIABLE! Something I learned to do was use the information from Wikipedia that was needed, but follow the hyper link of information to the source and look for the information I needed. Win-win situation right? Easy access to knowledge and citing a source that wasn't Wikipedia. Well today we were shown how to check for reliability of Wikipedia pages. Mind Blown. This is a skill I didn't have and now do that I will definitely teach my future students. I really enjoyed the idea of looking for pages that are start or stub and having students research the topic and fix the article. I personally think if executed properly, say by picking a topic that a student or group of students enjoy, they will feel a sense of satisfaction knowing their hard-work helped contribute to a page about that subject.

I plan on showing my students how to look for outside resources. While students are at home struggling on an assignment they will have the option to ask peers for help, but they also will have the option of turning to the next best thing for help: YouTube or Google. I want to take the time to show students useful tips for researching that will make their lives easier, site: because frankly because I thought it was great and I want to share that knowledge. I'll provide resources such as Khan Academy that have tutorials and practice problems for students because every student learns different. This could be a way to help give my students a resource to turn to when using the internet for help.

To continue, I LOVE FlipGrid! Being a math person, we run into the constant, "But your students can cheat my looking it up on the internet." whereas FlipGrid proves a student is doing their homework while explaining their steps. While learning about "Just incase learning" and "Just in time learning" I thought of FlipGrid. Repetition and muscle memory may be fantastic for other muscles, that's not how our brain works. Our brain is more of a system that works as a spider web, not storage cabinets. Giving students a handful of math problems they need to record themselves while narrating their steps will be far more impactful that assigning 50 problems for repetition. FlipGrid was my favorite thing to learn about and use today.

I can only hope I land in a school district that is 1:1 and trying to incorporate technology in the classroom. However, if not, that's merely an obstacle I will overcome. Odds are students will want to use their phones leaving laptops or other tech devices available for student who may not have a smart phone. With just this class session I now know I have a network of people I can turn to for advice and help thanks #Twitter.