I remember in 2006, sitting in Tim Horton’s with another first-year teacher talking about Facebook. Something we had just learned about. Can you imagine being a part of this? What could this possibly mean for a teacher? Students would see everything we do? This is a bad idea!
Fast forward a few months, I too made a Facebook account and still have it today. I am a fairly private person and am not super excited about sharing my life on social media. I do post occasionally. I enjoy the platform for keeping up with friends I don’t often see and seeing their children grow…even though I rarely post pictures of my own. I have strict rules about accepting friend requests, especially from students. Only if they have graduated high school, I will accept them as friends. I also don’t accept students’ parents as friends. It’s my attempt to keep my work and personal life a little separate.
I also have Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest being my most go to platforms. I began using Twitter when I took EC&I 834 with Katia, a year and a half ago. This is where I first realized the connections you can make with educators, teaching ideas, and many other education related sources. I haven’t yet started using it regularly however, I can see how you could build a community of Twitter.
Instagram, I use for connecting with friends and following other teachers and other personal interest items. This is platform I turn to the most often to scroll through, which can be a time waster for sure!
I remember hearing about Pinterest early in my teaching career. My colleagues strongly suggested that I don’t check it out until report cards were over so I would never get my report cards written. It too has a lot of information. I enjoy using it for teaching ideas, family picture outfit suggestions, and how to hang pictures on my wall just to name a few. I use this platform often when looking for ideas for any kind.
After reading this week’s articles about building a PLN, Professional Learning Network, I am inspired to use these tools in a different way. This is the way I have been using Twitter not realizing what I was doing. PLN, makes me think about Edsby groups I am apart of and how we use the groups to ask questions and support colleagues within our school division.
My relationship with social media is mostly positive as I have set boundaries for myself and how I would like to connect with others and who I would like to connect with. The biggest negative for me would be the time I can waste “scrolling” when there are other things I should be doing.
