Internet Fraud?

When doing school work, students use the internet for multiple reasons.  As a future teacher, I feel it is my responsibility to give my students some sort of insight on what is a reliable source and what is not reliable.  Most students do not realize that not all the information on the internet is accurate, up to date, or biased.  Without the guidance they may never know and may be feeding false information into their brain.  In order to give them thhe proper guidance, I would plan a lesson before giving them their first big assignment where internet access would be used.  In this lesson I would give multiple examples of websites that are reliable and ones that are not.  When using these examples, I would point out the different flaws in all of the unreliable and point out of the information and kep points on the reliable pages, such as the url. When evaluating a website, the students should look for six main key clues; the author of the site, who it was published by, the main purpose of the site, who the intended audience of the site is, the quality of the information, an how all of it adds up.  Personally I do not believe all websites need to be evaluated, however if the website just ends in a .com or is a wikipedia website it should be evaulated.  For example, wikipedia is a website full of a lot of great information, but at the same time it is able to be altered by any person who feels the need to change what is already there.  Therefore it may not be as reliable anymore.  If a website ends in .edu however, it is more than likely to be written by some scholar or a well educated person.  Therefore I will make sure my students are well educated so they do not struggle with turning in papers with false information.

Can You Feel The Beat?

Music, to me, is very calming and peaceful.  It puts me into a state of mind where I can just focus and think.  In my classroom during free homework work time, I plan on playing soft soothing music.  I feel that it will help the students relax and not feel so tense or caught up in everything else around them.  Instead I hope it helps them clear their mind.  When listening to a song I have heard before, it normally brings back the memories to the time I first heard it.  If I have not heard the song before, I like to listen to the lyrics and feel the beat and tempo.  These are all memories that come back to me that give me the sense of relief everytime I turn on the radio, CD player, or Ipod.
In my classroom, however, I will not just use the music to get their mind off of things so that they can focus on some of the work, but yet I will find engaging music that goes along with the lesson plans to help them learn the material.  A lot of students learn better when something is to a beat rather than a drowned out lecture or video.  I would then find a wide variety of music to hopefully grasp every student at some point in time.  One of my assignments could be to find a song or create a song to relate it to the lesson that is going on; what a great way to not only get the students minds going, but also to give them something enjoyable to do for a project.  This I believe would motivate the students more on some of the assignments and to help them get their grades to improve.  Like I stated earlier, anything with a beat is a great way to get some information memorized because it gives a beat to move along to.