Blog Post 4

     For my standard, I chose the 11th-12th grade which requires students to "Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem." This standard means that a student should not only be able to find information in various places, but also describe and interpret that information relatively intuitively. I feel prepared to implement this standard because I am generally very good at finding and relaying information to others. Therefore, I don't think that teaching this skill to other people would be too difficult for me.

    When I looked at the resources on Cpalms, I was pleasantly surprised to see general guides for lesson plans. This could be very helpful for teachers starting out, as well as those who may be teaching a new subject for the first time. I specifically looked at some of the US History lesson plans, and while I am glad they tend to be very general, I can't help but feel some of these lesson plans are asking the wrong guiding questions. Take for example the lesson plan for social security. While it does offer some relatively diverse sources and encourages kids to better analyze historical sources, its guiding question is quite simply "Which historical account is most accurate?" Of course there is nothing wrong with this inherently, as it is a good practice for identifying primary and secondary sources, however there are much better questions we could be asking based on the material within the lesson plan, like how did people of the time view social security versus today, or how did this debate over the new deal shape future legislations on social projects? Ultimately, this may be a good start for teachers to plan a lesson, yet they will inevitably need some tweaking depending on the class's needs. 

    In order to be a teacher who can introduce proper sources to students, you must be able to use google search relatively well. This means using some features we learned about this week, like google images or google advanced search. You can also use google scholar, which is specifically useful for accredited sources.  I personally find reverse image search to be very useful, as it is better at finding images than a simple word search.