Today, we were lucky enough to have Jesse Miller of @mediatedreality give a guest lecture on professional responsibilities and our personal and public identities as teachers. It was an incredibly interesting class and I learnt a lot about the lack of privacy on social media and how what we choose to post can impact our teaching careers.

One of the topics that Mr. Miller touched on was the quality vs. quantity of “screen time”. Growing up, my parents raised me to believe  “screen time” was a synonym for brain rotting evil. At age five, I was strictly limited to “only fifteen minutes of Webkinz per day”. In Junior High, my mum would instruct me to put my phone away in a special box when I had to do homework or chores to do. Nevertheless, these are the same parents who told me to focus on writing my online essays and assignments before going out and have been nagging me to Facetime them more ever since I moved away for University. Perhaps what my mum and dad were worried about was “screen quality”, rather than just “screen time.”

The prevalence of cell phones is one of the biggest cultural shifts of the last decade.  As children become technologically literate at younger and younger ages, I think it is important for us to recognize that cellphones can be tools for learning, not just distractions. I graduated high school in 2018, making my generation one of the first ones with cellphones in our bags or pockets through our later years of formal schooling. Teachers weren’t used to this, and thus we fell victim to rants about how we were “destroying our brains” with technology

Mr. Miller posed one question in particular that really got me thinking; would you pay a dollar a day for social media? Although I use snapchat and instagram daily, and they are a big part of my life and how I interact with friends, I immediately knew I would never pay just to access these social media platforms. This leads me to wonder; why am I putting so much time and energy into something I wouldn’t consider to be monetarily significant?

All in all,  Jesse provided a valuable lecture for a group of future teachers going into a digital world where privacy can be harder to find than we sometimes hope. I’ll keep what he said in mind as I look to find a teaching job while almost maintaining a social media presence.

-Katie

(P.S.- photos weren’t uploading for this post, so it’ll have to be just words until I can sort this out!)