Can Wicipedia be trusted?/ What I've Learned this Year (week 5)

NPR article

This article explains how a college student named Virgil Griffith found a way to detect that others were getting onto an information site called Wikipedia and changing the information to make it false. When people got onto the program, it finds the “fingerprints” of the wrong doers. Mr. Griffith found out that anyone can get on the site and change information to make them truer to benefit the topic or false to turn people’s ideas about the topic. Wikipedia is used by a lot of people. Most of these people being school students, getting information about a research topic or person for class assignments and papers. But can, with this new information, make Wikipedia trustworthy for the information?

When I do papers for History or English, I try to stick to web pages that end in a .gov. This makes me think and my other professors from a previous college to be more accurate than others ending in.com or .org. This doesn’t mean that I would never use Wikipedia ever, but I will get other information from different sites as well. With what Mr. Griffith found out it is hard, to me to be considered a realizable source. When reading the information on Wikipedia I would now always question if somebody as changing the information for better or worse.

"What I've Learned This Year" by Mr. McClung

“What I’ve Learned This Year” by, Mr. McClung is about a teacher that had just had his first year in the classroom and shares his experience in what he learned from that year to help future teachers on their first year of teaching. Mr. McClung gives seven main advice tips. Those are, learn how to read a crowd, be flexible, communicate, be reasonable, don’t be afraid of technology, listen to your students, and never stop learning. There were two things that stuck out at me in this blog. The first ones was when Mr. McClung said, “No lesson is ever perfect. The lesson you teach and the one you plan are always different.” Another one said, “I know my teacher cares about me as a person when he listens to what I say.”

What I take away from this blog is that I can not go into my first year of teaching expecting everything to go as planned. You never know what can happen from day to day. I will also know that all students are not perfect, just like I’m not perfect. As a teacher you have to listen to what a student tells and correspond to their needs. The biggest thing that I will take away from this post is that I can not stop learning just like a student can not stop learning. Teachers and students will learn together.