firsts

These things have happened in the course of my classroom teaching for the first time recently

• Two students brought their own laptops to school which ran a linux OS (Year 11)
• I asked a technical question in class ("What does GIF stand for?"). Within seconds a student has retrieved the answer from wikipedia (Year 9)
• I ask students to update their internet money so we can use the internet next lesson. Next lesson a student brings her iphone and mac laptop to class. She has setup her phone as a modem which blue tooth's to her laptop. She explains that she is not going to waste her money on the heavily filtered school internet (Year 11)
• A student asks me if we can do a particular science experiment as part of the electricity / magnetism topic. I haven't heard of this experiment before and ask him where he has heard of it. He replied, "Youtube" (Year 9). Actually I think I have just found the video that he was talking about: