Week #4 Reflection (UPDATE: Screen Record Completed!)

“The information highway”

This rang so true for me. The internet these days is so vast. It provides both a lot of opportunity, and a lot of danger for us as educators. In fact, after today, I would say mostly danger — or at least more danger than I had thought.

I found it interesting that the speaker told us that addiction had to include being willing to commit a crime when refuting that social media can be addicting. This is not my understanding, after taking some coursework in addictions, and it does not appear to be reflected in the DSM-5. In fact, after a quick search, I cannot seem to find any evidence for this statement (albeit, my search was not totally comprehensive). This does not seem like the type of statement to be throwing around lightly. Not everyone who has an addiction, in my experience, is willing to commit a crime to sustain it. I feel like there were ways to push back on social media addictions without speaking in a way that, at best, stretches what addiction actually is.

It also doesn’t seem all that fair to me that our personal social media are under such scrutiny. Not that I don’t get it. We are entrusted with young people, the most vulnerable population in our society. But it seems a bit absurd that we need to be so on guard all the time, just because some parents are unreasonable. Yes, we obviously shouldn’t put our class pictures on Tinder, but you can’t hold a beer in an Instagram photo? Really? We’re professionals, not children, and it’s completely unreasonable in my view that 1. Our districts/admin would feel the need to babysit us to this extent and 2. That any parent would be upset that a fully grown adult shared a picture with a glass of wine. If it’s not on the job, it shouldn’t be a problem. Is the Prime Minister even held to such a standard? I am obviously not advocating for teachers to post photos getting smashed, but I think there are limits, and it just seems like part of the message was “Your only identity is as a teacher, and if you want to share any other part of yourself online, you are walking the thinnest possible line'”. This is not at all an indictment of the speaker, but rather the way our society views teachers as needing to be 100% all in on their work at all times.

I appreciated him raising the point that when you take phones, we’re then in charge of thousands of dollars of personal property. That’s a good point, and one we should carefully consider as teachers. I know I don’t want to open myself up to this kind of liability, so if I need to enforce phone policies, I am going to want to be very careful about how I do so. I wonder how tools such as cellphone holders (see above) fit into this discussion.

Finally, I appreciated him talking (and warning) about LinkedIn. I am slightly familiar with it, but appreciated him explaining that it can be both useful and extremely fluffy and misleading.

This was definitely a highly engaging and useful presentation, and I appreciated the wisdom! I would be curious what other people think about classroom cellphone policies or if they see social media as addicting or not. Thank you to my loyal readers!

February 6, 2024 Update: Screen recording completed!

After a bit of time not remembering to complete it, I have finally completed my screen recording! I used the app Screenplay on my phone that was recommended to us, and honestly, it was pretty straightforward. I simply downloaded the app, created an account quickly (through my Apple account), and hit the record button. The only part that tripped me up a bit was trying to upload. It did not appear to let me simply download a video file; instead, it is making me link to Screenplay and have people watch my video from there. This is not a big deal, but it was a bit different than I expected. Maybe this process would go differently if I paid for the premium version. Overall, a nice experience (and very similar to just screen recording on an iPhone)!

My video is not that exciting — I mostly just wanted to try it out. You will see me visit my blog and play a bit of my favourite daily puzzle game, Puckdoku! You can find my screencast here.