Top three forms of technology I use for communication:
1.
Cell phone2. Facebook
3. Email
These are the
three main uses of technology I utilize for communication. As much as I want to
deny it, I have been sucked into the world of text messaging, emailing and
social media like the rest of the United States population. These three forms
of technology, cell phone, Email, and Facebook have become such a huge part of
everyday life that we even found ways to do all three at once, through our cell
phones. With our cell phones, we can make phone calls, text messages, connect
to Facebook, check emails, and even download Facebook instant messaging apps
that allow us to do basically the same thing text messaging does. It is for
this reason why I have chosen cell phone use as the number one form of
technology used for communication. If
even I admit to using these technologies a little more than I want to, than as
a teacher I must ask myself, are my students even more sucked into this
technology world than I am?
In the video
above, the student Olivia expresses her love for her Myspace page. Before
Facebook became popular, Myspace was where young people wanted to be. I think
what attracted Olivia to Myspace is exactly what has attracted most teenagers
to the website. Myspace gave teenagers what they naturally crave, which is the
freedom to express yourself publicly. Olivia stated that she would spend up to
five hours on the computer looking at other people’s pages or fixing up her
own. I can relate to Olivia in this
video because Myspace started to become very popular when I was in high school.
I would spend hours decorating my
Myspace page and like Olivia, my Myspace become a way for me to express myself.
In high school, your profile page was just as important as the clothes you
wore.
Myspace died out
about five years ago when Facebook started to take over the social media world.
Facebook does not give you as much freedom as far as decorating your profile,
but it gives society something else that is a little more powerful, a voice. I
find the Facebook status an amazing form of expression and I believe that many
sometime take it a little too seriously. What is even more amazing than the
Facebook status is the News Feed, which gives you updates of what your friends
are saying instantly! In one click almost the whole world can know what you ate
that day.
The biggest
difference between Myspace and Facebook is that while Myspace was an expression of one’s self through posts
of pictures, song lyrics, videos, and cool designs, Facebook is a documentation
of one’s life. It seems as if Facebook has realized this too and has taken full
advantage of it when they added their Timeline feature to everyone’s Facebook
page.
In the video
above, these young people seem have similar thoughts on technology as I do as
far as the most common uses. I use technology for a lot of the same reasons as
they do. The difference between myself
and young people is that I know when to draw the line between healthy uses of
technology and unhealthy uses of technology. This is one thing I worry about
for my students. Are they spending too much time typing questions into Google,
playing video games, and downloading apps? Do they even know that there is a
point where excessive technology use can be unhealthy?
As teachers I think we should be constantly
asking these questions. It is ok for our students to know that we too use
technology the same was as they do because we have to be their technology role
model. However, in order to be a technology role model, we have to make healthy
technology choices ourselves. Because social media and cell phone use are still
fairly new, healthy technology use is not something that is commonly thought
about, so it is up to us to decide in ourselves what it means to make healthy
technology choices.
As far as
student learning, I believe technology can be a great resource for learning. One
young person in the video put it very well saying that “we have all the
information in the world and we can learn from it by deciding what information
can be useful towards our goals.”
When I teach I
am constantly reminded by my students how different they are in the technology
world as I am. A student asked me a question the other day that opened my mind
to the technology world in my student’s perspective. After learning about Nirvana
in Rock and Roll History class, a student asked, “If there was no internet in
the 90s, then how did people watch music videos?” A question that seemed so
silly to me was a great concern to my student. This made me realize that although
my students and I engage in the same activities on Facebook and text messaging,
our technology histories are different. I come from a different generation
where I had no idea what an Email was, where my students have had the word
Email in their vocabulary since they first started talking.
I realize that
there will always be this gap between teacher and student as far as technology
and I hope that one day all teachers will be aware that no matter how much more
your students know about technology than you do, the teacher will always be the
students’ technology role model.
