14: Reflecting on What You Learned

Of the many things I learned in this class this semester, those that will be most useful to me in my professional and personal life will be the ones regarding the internet. Coming in to this class, I considered myself pretty knowledgeable about the web; this course showed me quite the contrary. As the saying goes, you don't know what you don't know, and looking back, I can't believe how much I didn't know. For years I had gotten by doing research with basic search tools like Google, never delving in to the "deep web." I found some of the meta crawlers and other tools to be extremely useful and yield much more accurate results than Google. As a teacher-in-training, I am very happy to have learned how much more helpful the internet can be when you know how to use it. Certainly, I will always use the web to try to find new assignments, lessons, facts, and other supplemental learning aids for my classroom, and I feel like I am much better prepared to do so because of this class. Thus, while I learned a great deal about research in general, I think the knowledge I have gained with regards to the internet will prove to be invaluable to me in the years to come.