blog post #4

The ELA technology standards are set in place to ensure that students are proficient in their ability to use technology through a variety of different contexts and applications within their education. Since I plan to eventually work with university-level students, I chose to focus on grades 11-12, as this is the closest applicable grade level, and this is also when many students begin preparing for their journey into higher education. One of the ELA standards featured that I think is definitely necessary in order to thrive in an institute of higher learning would be Standard LAFS.1112.WHST.3.8. This standard essentially requires that students demonstrate that they are able to use advanced searching to find and properly analyze relevant and credible digital sources. The standard also mentions that students should be able to seamlessly integrate information from their sources, without overly relying on direct quotations and ensuring that there is no possibility of accidental (or intentional) plagiarism by properly crediting and citing the sources used. I feel confident to implement this standard in my own classroom; this is a skill set that I learned early on in my educational career (around 8th grade), but I would say that it has been nearly perfected throughout years of completing research papers and conducting scientific experiments. Given that I want to teach at the university level, I would expect that my students would have met this standard in the recent past, or at least have some level of experience with researching.

After navigating the CPALMS website, I was able to find the 9-12 grade toolkit, which consisted of common core standards, lesson plans, activities, and many more resources according to the subject area. I am interested in teaching psychology but I know that it is not taught as a primary subject in most primary/grade schools, so I chose to focus on finding scientific resources related to the brain. I found one single resource for grades 9-12 on the parts of the brain and their functions, linked here: Major Parts of the Human Brain. This is an interactive student tutorial, which I thought of as being quite helpful since psychology is the study of the mind and human behavior; thus, it is imperative that students have a solid understanding of the location of different structures, as well as how they contribute to cognitive/physiological processes, etc. I would easily be able to incorporate this resource in my classroom, especially if I were teaching a course in cognitive or developmental psychology. Even within my more niche area of personality psychology, understanding how differences in hormone levels in the brain can contribute to the development of mood disorders such as depression relies heavily on having a solid background in brain anatomy.

I think that one of the most important attributes for both educational and professional development is having solid research skills. Research skills are the ability to search for and find relevant information, and also to collect, analyze, and interpret the information. Having a proper understanding of good research skills is an integral aspect of an educator's purpose, as students learn these same skills from their teachers. Educators need to be able to filter out irrelevant or incorrect information and provide unbiased material to supplement their students' curriculum. When using search engines, many students are not aware of their full capabilities; the term Boolean search may sound just straight-up weird to them. Knowing how to properly search for information is the key to being able to help your students learn how to search for themselves. For me, I personally use quotation marks in my searches quite often, as it returns sources featuring the exact phrase within the quotations. This helps keep me from wasting time and allows me to narrow my results down to those of most relevance to my specific topic, which is key to constructing solid research.