Vindication! And other mind blowing moments.

Wikipedia Vindication

I have been vindicated! For as many times as I have been told that Wikipedia was not a good source, I still chose to use Wikipedia as a basis for information. I might not have cited it directly but I checked the sources cited by Wikipedia. And guess what? This will be no shock to anyone from our class - the sources were legitimate and reputable! Instead of telling our students not to use a specific site, whether Wikipedia or anything else, we should be helping them understand how to be critical of information, how to research and not be reliant on pages like Wikipedia. 

Mind Blown

Well, maybe saying my mind was blown is a slight exaggeration but why in world didn't anyone in class know about the newspaper search and indexing in Google? Why isn't this a bigger deal? So, I'm a history and family ancestry nerd and this would have helped me out so much! Also, citations in Google docs...where has this been my whole life? Someone NEEDS to tell Whitworth's library about this. They've been pushing the use of Zotero but honestly...Google makes it so much easier and they offer so much free of charge. 

Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants

I'm trying to decide which one of these I fall into. When I was in elementary school, the internet was not a thing. We did play Oregon Trail on an Apple computer that looked much like this:

But it wasn't until I was in middle school when my family purchased a Gateway PC and got AOL dialup internet. However, I did complete a lot of my high school papers using that trusty Gateway, had a laptop in college and today am often the one in my group of friends at least, that is the helping with their technology issues. I remember life without it and have fond memories of it. However, I don't miss printing out directions on MapQuest and then worrying about what if there was road construction. Thank you Google maps for saving this lost girl. 

Success vs Fear

This was one of my biggest aha's of the day. We may not have gotten to what we wanted to achieve today but we did find many other ways that didn't work. Failures should be viewed as successes in progress, the scenic route, or the deeper dive. I know I've always learned more from the times I wasn't successful. Some of them were hard lessons to learn but they've stuck with me. Fear, failure and success are all part of the ups and downs of life but helping our students learn from their failures and taking fear out of the equation is definitely one of the reasons I want to be a teacher.