I find the whole debate surrounding technology rather fascinating. When I was in high school, they were almost never allowed in the classroom (truly, maybe one or two times a school year) and though I’m not long removed from high school, the attitude surrounding them has changed completely.

Personally, I can’t say I love the idea of allowing students to blatantly be on their phones in class, but I am also in a teachable subject that there is a lot of hands-on doing and collaboration, so being on their phones doesn’t only affect them, but negatively impacts the entire class. But I do see the upside to them. Talking to a teacher at my observation school, they said that for a lot of students who have a lot of anxiety or ADHD, they use them to stimulate themselves quietly, so they can still be present in the classroom and hopefully learn something. This conversation with them really opened my eyes, because really, at the end of the day we are there for our students, and anyway that they are in the classroom is always a good day.

Going back to Jesse’s chat today was interesting, though I can’t say remarkably eye-opening, he did have a lot of good insight into how to meet them in the middle. Using his example of twenty minutes of class and 2 minutes on their phones could work, but it really depends on the classroom. I do think that their phones can be a great tool for assessment (things like Kahoot, or surveys) to see where they are at that moment, and giving them a silent, anonymous way to demonstrate that is really important. I always appreciate that as a student and as a person who is very shy and lacks the confidence to speak in class.

It is also critical in giving special needs students an opportunity to participate in class, particularly when teachers do not make sure the content they show is captioned or offered with described video or an image description. Technology, particularly in the convenience of a cell phone has made the world more accessible; even zoom, though most folks hated it. Being online gave students who needed accommodations the opportunity to participate in a greater way because their learning environment was more accessible. I definitely benefited from this, because I could turn up the volume of people in zoom to what I needed, so being back in person and wearing masks has negatively affected how I can participate in classes because people’s voices are muffled. (Though, I would not feel comfortable in a maskless classroom at the moment, personally) I am not writing this for pity, but, I think it’s important for able-bodied folks to realize how online education was actually quite a bit more accessible than in-person education is for many people, and we have technology like zoom to thank for that.

I appreciate that we have talked about the legalities of being a teacher in a social media-influenced world, because we have to protect our students, and so I am grateful for that, and it has opened my eyes to what privacy is. Why is a direct message on Instagram wrong, given only the people involved can see it when an email is seen as acceptable, though only the people involved see it? Is it the servers they are hosted on, the companies they are owned by? These are the kind of questions I hope to gain some clarity on in the coming weeks.