Using Social Networking Tools in K-College Instruction: Pros and Cons

Article Summary

Wade's (n.d.) article explores the impacts of social networking on K-college students both in and outside of school. Social networking sites empower students to engage in productive activities, such as finding an internship, sharing success stories/strategies to overcoming obstacles relevant to their peers (e.g.: repaying student loans), and collaborating with others around the world. Social networking sites also allow administrators to strengthen their school community. Through running social media pages for the school, parents, teachers, administrators, and students stay connected to current events relevant to the school community. Additionally, these sites give administrators chances to provide more options for parents to participate in school events. Allowing parents the option to attend meetings virtually enables a wider variety of parents to participate, including those who have obligations that would not allow them to attend meetings in person.  

Despite some hesitation about the distractibility of students when they use social networking sites during the school day, social networking sites can be advantageous to students as a collaboration and organizational tool. Learning management systems (LMS), like Moodle and Blackboard, have been prevalent in classrooms for more than ten years. Wade (n.d.) argued that the utilization of such LMSs will eventually transition into a wider use of social networking sites in classrooms. Students generally have a positive reaction towards a teacher's decision to use social networking sites in their instruction, as the sites allow students more options to share their thoughts about academic topics using platforms with which they are most comfortable. This article quotes Professor Carla Dawson from the Catholic University of Cordoba, who states that the technological trends of today become the "standard" form of communication tomorrow and stresses that schools need to adapt these modern forms of communication into their instruction in order to make instruction most relevant to the students.

a) Why do you consider this to be an example of ways in which new media and technologies can positively contribute to society?

The information in this article rings true to my observations regarding the use of social networking tools, particularly in social networking tools' ability to strengthen parent/teacher/administrator relationships. My current principal is a strong proponent for the use of new media to promote the school, and, under her leadership, our school began and maintains active Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts. My principal encourages teachers to submit pictures of classroom activities in order to promote our school and give parents and potential families a glimpse into all that we have to offer. Current parents, alumni, older current students, our Diocesan school board, and other Diocesan schools interact with posts the most frequently, which helps to promote the school to the general public. The social media accounts also greatly help in communicating urgent messages, like sudden school cancelations or reminders about PTO meetings or dress-down days.

The middle school teachers at my school have used two different LMSs in my seven-year run: During my first year, the 1:1 iPad initiative in the middle school was new, and we used Showbie as an online dropbox for students to submit work and teachers to quickly grade that work. Showbie also offered students and teachers the ability to exchange messages about assignments, as students could leave a comment in a work folder, and teachers could respond outside of school hours, which helped absent or confused students. After the pandemic hit, our Diocese switched over to Schoology, which is an LMS that offered many more options, including the ability to conduct video conferences, create discussion boards and polls, and conduct assessments online. Both of these LMSs provide(d) students with a tool in which they could stay organized with their work and upcoming tests and quizzes, ask questions to teachers, and engage in educational discussions with one another. These LMSs have many of the same characteristics as social networking sites that students use daily, except the LMSs are regulated by teachers, so students only use them as an academic tool. This allows students to learn how to effectively communicate via a digital tool so that they may some day take some of the communication and digital citizenship skills they have learned while using features of the LMS and apply them to the social networking tools that they use in their everyday lives.

b) What challenges are encountered in such contexts?

Middle schoolers are not always on task when they have a device. Even with our firewalls in place, students have the skills necessary to access blocked content. Many students are extremely tech savvy and know how to circumvent the security settings, allowing them unrestricted access to the Internet. Some students show signs of having an addiction to the iPad, as they constantly use a device at home and cannot seem to peel themselves away from the device even after a teacher instructs them to shut the iPad multiple times. We, as teachers, have to be proactive about setting boundaries within our classrooms regarding when a student can use their device and strategizing about how we can best monitor their activity/iPad usage while they are in our classroom while still delivering our instruction.

The one challenge I have observed with our use of social media is the fact that social media coverage of the school can be political in nature, as some parents deem that certain students are always making an appearance in pictures on our social media sites, while their kid rarely does. The fact of the matter is that some teachers habitually take many pictures and others deem frequent picture taking to be a waste of time or an interruption to their instruction, so the teachers who run our social media accounts do their best to make sure that the accounts have representation of all grade levels and a variety of the activities that we run.

Overall, the benefits of using social networking in K-12 or K-college settings outweigh the challenges, and I look forward to seeing how schools will continue to use social networking tools in the future.

Reference

Wade, L. (n.d.). How social media is reshaping today's education system. Center for Social Impact Communication. Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https://csic.georgetown.edu/magazine/social-media-reshaping-todays-education-system/ 

"Who am I?" - uh, again: The Internet and Professionalism Remix

"I love that my middle school yearbooks now appear as search results when people Google my name," said no sane person, ever.

During my second year at my current job, I was explaining the concept of professionalism to my eighth grade students. I emphasized that one of the primary lessons the school teaches students is how to compartmentalize their personal and more "professional" personas, which is why there are certain rules and expectations regarding language, dress codes, and mannerisms that students are expected to follow at school but not necessarily at home. I went on to state that, I, as a teacher, have to act professional in my classroom in front of my students, otherwise I might be in danger of losing my job. Of course, as I was pointing this out, one of my eighth graders questioned the professionalism part when she pointed out that some of my classroom decorations included a row of clementines on which students had drawn faces, a twig in a metallic pail, drawings of a hybrid cabbage-unicorn creature called a cabbicorn, and a canvas with a winking cow drawn in the center - and I kept a pair of bear paw slippers under my desk. Perhaps she had a point; however, I will argue that there is a distinction between silliness and professionalism: It's possible to be silly while still being professional. 

It is very easy for me to cultivate my "professional" identity at work: I have direct control my work ethic, choice of clothes and language, and my daily actions in front of my students. However, regardless of how I feel about it, my identity as a teacher is also cultivated in cyberspace - a place in which I do not always have control: Although I share my first and last name with hundreds of people in the US, the correct combination of search terms for my name will bring up a number of results over which I have no control: my page on ratemyteachers.com (the website recently took down all of the old ratings and comments, but for quite a while, anonymous ratings from former students were out in the public eye), my middle school yearbooks (courtesy of my hometown's historical society), records of my address and former addresses as well as the names of all of my relatives. I am not overly excited that any of these items exist publicly online for anybody, including my students, to access them, but, like many others (Solove, 2011), I have come to accept the fact that one cannot expect privacy in this digital age.

Lowenthal et al. (2016) emphasized the importance of professionals maintaining a personally-controlled website, as such a website "...gives professionals that is under their control to ensure consistency and reliability over time; the professionals determine how they are presented professionally online, and when work and ideas are publicly shared" (p. 323). Last semester in our Instructional Design class, my cohort members and I were required to create an online portfolio for our assignments. I opted to create a professional website that showcased my work for the class as well as my teaching philosophy, educational history, and photos of me "in action" in my classroom and extra-curricular activities. This website is public and is therefore accessible to anybody who might want to learn more about me. According to Lowethal et al. (2016), I should update my professional website at least once every six months to keep the information on the site current for any professional who may come across my site. 

To further build my professional identity, I should invest more time in maintaining an active Twitter account. My Twitter account was created for a class during my master's program, and in the ten years since that program ended, I have followed hundreds of educational professionals - most of whom are complete strangers with whom I have connected via EdChats. With this very large professional learning network, I have ample opportunities to take advantage of the knowledge base and professional expertise of this group, but I am just not logging in. If I spend more time tweeting - even if I just logged in once or twice per week - and overall maintaining a more active account, I could further build my professional identity and strengthen my connections within my PLN.

I currently believe that my professional identity is primarily cultivated through my reputation in my immediate community. I have been at my current place of employment (a small, PK-8 Catholic school) for over seven years and, in that time, have build connections with my colleagues, students, and families. They know how I run my classes, they know how hard I will work for their student and their family, and they put a lot of trust in me. I am also an active parishioner at the church affiliated with the school, and I am recognized by parishoners for my involvement in the music ministry and young adult group. There really is not much of my professional identity that is made online, as I rarely tweet or network with anybody. I had a few very positive reviews on ratemyteachers.com before the website removed all of the old reviews, which would have positively impacted my professional identity for anybody who wanted to do a background check on me. 

Like many other professionals in academia (Hinton, n.d.), my biggest challenge to my digital ecology for my identity as a teacher lies in my use of Facebook, specifically in keeping my public and private life in balance on social media. The community in which I teach is very close, and it is not uncommon for several parents, who have become close friends of mine, to become Facebook friends with the teachers, as we are all one large church and school community. I almost always accept friend requests from the parents, as most other teachers at my school do, which is very unique to my community; however, this does impact the content that I will choose to post on my Facebook page. I rarely post anything that is political in nature, as I do not want to alienate any part of my community. I do have filters for my posts, and I have all the parents/former students in one group that is sometimes filtered from my posts if I believe certain posts of mine will be considered too political, but, for the most part, the fact that parents and former students are my Facebook friends has not really impacted my posting habits, as a) I do not post very much, and b) when I do post, many times I share posts from my school's social media page, as most of my life centers around my job. 

As for my identity as a doctoral student, I do not really think I have much of an identity just yet. Obviously, I have not published any research as of yet, and my identity as a doctoral student is completely separated from my identity as a teacher, save for a few instances in which I had an assignment that impacted something I did or made at work. In some ways, I feel like I would have more of an identity as a doctoral student if I lived on campus - or had ever even been to the UF campus before - but, since I am completing my coursework through a hybrid program and COVID prevented all of my cohort's in-person sessions so far from happening, thus meaning that, two years into the program, I have never met my cohort members or professors in person before, I just do not feel that my identity as a doctoral student exists, outside of a reference to my degree on my LinkedIn profile or on my teacher profile posted to my school's website. I look forward to progressing in my program and, perhaps, building this part of my identity. Perhaps I will be able to integrate a little bit of silliness into this identity, as I do in my identity as a teacher.

References

Hinton, A. (n.d.). YouTube / "Context collapse" the. SlideShare. Retrieved February 5, 2022, from https://www.slideshare.net/andrewhinton/beyond-findability-context/44-YouTube_Context_Collapse_The_problem

Lowenthal, P. R., Dunlap, J. C., & Stilton, P. (2016). Creating an intentional web presence: Strategies for every educational technology professional. TechTrends, 60(4), 320-329. https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1141&context=edtech_facpubs  

Solove, D. J. (2011). Why privacy matters even if you have 'nothing to hide', Chronicle of Higher Education.

"Who am I?": Identity in the Age of Social Media

When I was in seventh grade, I remember sitting at my desk in my English class with my textbook opened to the introductory page of our newest short story unit. The theme: Who am I? As a seventh grader, I pondered why that question served as the foundation for an entire literature unit. Isn't a person's identity simply linked to their physical characteristics, parentage/family history, job, and choice of friends? As I soon learned, the concept of one's identity is anything but simple, and even as an adult, after knowing myself for over thirty years, I still cannot formulate a succinct answer to this question.

Who am I? We spend our lifetime pondering this question, and the answer to this question evolves as our life progresses to each successive chapter. Are we truly the sum of all our parts, or are we the attributes of ourselves that we pick and choose for others to see? 

I have always been very intrigued about the idea of each person living in their own, unique version of reality; our perceptions of ourselves as well as of other people are all unique and based on our individual life experiences/interactions. In my reality, I see my "whole", unfiltered self: the good, bad, and ugly. Of course, like a vast majority of people, I try to minimize the amount of exposure of my "bad" or "ugly" sides to other people, but, inevitably, they emerge from time to time. In general, family and close friends tend to be more forgiving and understanding when one's "bad" or "ugly" side emerges, as family and close friends have had more time to get to know and enjoy one's "good" side; this is less so the case with strangers and acquaintances, who, with one bad experience and nothing else upon which to base a judgement of a person's character or identity, will form a negative opinion about a person when they see that person's "bad" or "ugly" side.

The beauty of human relationships lies in the fact that they are malleable: a simple action or experience with another person can drastically change one's opinion of that person and that person's identity in the eye of one, or several, people. A simple kind gesture can be the springboard of a friendship. A compliment can be the first step towards a romantic relationship. A consensual hug or handshake can lay the first bricks for the foundation of a community. Terse words can cause life-long rifts among family, friends, or romantic partners. Fumbling one's words in a speech can mar a person's identity in the eyes of the public. Throughout most of human history, once an action has taken place, it becomes a piece of the past, unable to be altered, and never to be replayed. A person could be forgiven for a cruel action over time, and the action itself would remain in the past...

...and then came the dawn of Smartphones and social media.

According to an article by Flores (2018), social media gives a lot more permanence to a person's careless or hurtful words and actions, as, if there is evidence of those words or actions posted to social media, even deleting the evidence will not permanently remove it, as other people have the ability to take screenshots, save media to their device, and reupload these screenshots and media to other places on the Internet. Imagine having one of your worst moments recorded and uploaded to the Internet for a world-wide audience to see! Even years after the incident had passed, new audiences would watch the moment and make judgements about you and your character. This mistake would become a permanent part of your identity.

As an example of how one bad decision on social media can have a permanent impact on a person's reputation, Flores' (2018) article cites Roseanne Barr's 2018 Tweets that ultimately cost Roseanne her place on the reboot of her TV show and her reputation among many contacts in Hollywood and members of the general public. Although several years have passed since this incident took place, nobody is able to search for Roseanne's name in a public database without finding articles about this incident or images of the original Tweets. This Tweet now becomes part of Roseanne's digital footprint, and ultimately her online identity, that will follow her for life. 

Although social media can benefit our relationships with others by providing an online space in which people can establish and maintain connections with others that are "...similar to [the connections] obtained in offline relationships" (Grieve et. al, 2013, p. 608), it is important to remember that everything we post or write online - even if we are writing something in a "private" chat to somebody else or posting a picture to a supposedly-private account - permanently becomes part of our identity. It's also important to stress the importance of the digital footprint to the younger generation, living out their adolescent and college years via social media - and not always making the wisest choices about what to post. 

So who are we? Just as before, we appear to be the sum of our parts. In the offline world, we are still as complex and multifaceted as ever. However, in the age of Smartphones and social media, unfortunately, every digital "mistake" can be saved and thus permanently becomes part of our identity, which further emphasizes the need to think before you post and to the teach the younger generations to do the same.

References

Flores, T. (2018). How your social media defines you more than you think. Unwritten. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.readunwritten.com/2018/06/07/how-social-media-defines-you/

Grieve, R., Indian, M., Witteveen, K., Tolan, G. A., & Marrington, J. (2013). Face-to-face or Facebook: Can social connectedness be derived online? Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 604-609.

The Pandemic and Me: Changes in my Media Ecology

Hello, everybody! 

I am reviving my Edublog for my Instructional Computing course, so, if you are somehow still here from my blog's initial launch in 2010, prepare for weekly updates! 

In many ways, my experience of living through the COVID-19 lockdown starting in March 2020 was not unlike the experiences of most others: I had to quickly adapt to doing my job remotely, and my in-person social life abruptly ended for what seemed like an eternity. I would argue that I was definitely more socially isolated than most people: While most individuals live in a house with their family, I, a woman in my early 30s, lived in a townhouse with one roommate who rarely left her room and another roommate who spent her time during lockdown living with one of her relatives. Thus, I spent approximately the first two months of the lockdown entirely alone, with the absence of any in-person human interaction. 

There are a few facets of my life that are particularly unusual: Most people, by their 30s, if they have a significant other, reside with that person. My boyfriend and I have been dating for over eleven years, and, aside from our first seven months of dating, we have been a long-distance couple. In our time together, he has lived in three different states, and I have lived in two. There was a two-year period in which we were "only" a 2.5-hour driving distance apart, but even still, we were unable to see one another more than maybe twice a month. My parents and most of my close childhood friends live in my home state, from which I moved 500 miles away in 2015 in order to take my current job. Thus, going into the pandemic, I was already very used to using electronic platforms and innovations to maintain my closest relationships. The only difference was that now, not only did I have to use electronic innovations to maintain those relationships, but now, I had to maintain a long-distance relationship with every single person in my life - from my students to my co-workers and other casual acquaintances. Although our physical distances were, at most, just a few miles apart, these were functionally long-distance relationships in that I had no way of actually seeing these people in person and had to communicate with them using the same electronic innovations that I had previously reserved for my boyfriend and parents.

Since getting together with others in person was no longer an option, I, like many people stuck at home, went to social media as a means of connecting with people in the outside world. I had begun to notice that the very nature of social media posts began to shift as the months of the lockdown progressed. No more were people posting pictures of their extravagant vacations or status updates about some award won by their child; nobody's life was made to look grandiose or "perfect", as was often the case before the lockdown. The content of what I saw on social media during this time is very consistent with types of content witnessed by a variety of people interviewed in Rani Molla's (2021) recent article on Vox: [In social media postings during the early days of the COVID-lockdown], "...houses were a mess, children were home and misbehaved, people didn't wear makeup." No longer did any of us strive to depict our lives as "perfect," for we all shared a reality in which nothing was perfect. In fact, according to Molla's (2021) article, social media platforms that exposed the less "perfect" sides of our lives were the platforms that had the most growth during the pandemic (e.g.: TikTok). It makes sense, though: We were afraid of the future. Nobody knew how long we would have to stay inside; nobody knew whether this virus would wipe out our entire species, as a vaccine had not been developed; there was just so much uncertainty that we used social media as a platform to bond over our fears and the imperfections of our lives. We knew nobody was living their "best lives" (I am so sick of that phrase...), and any attempt to pretend that we were was met with scrutiny and disbelief.

I recently looked back at my own Facebook posts around that time. While I did not post frequently, I did use Facebook as a means of posting humorous content during the pandemic from time to time. As a middle school teacher at a school with a 1:1 iPad program, we had a pretty smooth transition to our eLearning model. My school actually had our eLearning up and running less than a week after school was called off. The first several weeks of our eLearning model was asynchronous: The teachers would unlock a new folder on Showbie (our learning management system at the time) daily that contained the students' work for the day. I made daily instructional videos for each grade level (sixth, seventh, and eighth), in which I tried to keep the spirit of my class alive through somewhat interactive games (I would hide a "Secret Word of the Day" within a piece of content that I made for class that day and would challenge the kids to find the "Secret Word of the Day" as they were going through their lessons) and activities (I once asked the eighth graders to illustrate what they believed an oven toaster would look like, and then I took the pictures and made them into a slideshow that introduced the next day's video). I would also occasionally dress up in humorous costumes for the videos just to catch everybody off guard (I once dressed up in the student uniform and asked the kids if they missed having to wear it every day. Then, for some reason I think was related to some kind of Virtual Spirit Week, I also dressed up in an elephant onesie and wore a pink cowboy hat.) Because my antics lifted my own spirits and the spirits of the students I taught, I would occasionally post about them on Facebook just to give my friends and personal community at large something to laugh about in those uncertain times. 

Molla's (2021) article states that during the pandemic, a lot of people "...abstained from posting [on social media] to not give the impression they were doing something they shouldn't be." This definitely described me, especially once the school year ended. In early June 2020, my thought process was that I was going to stay in my house all summer and just wait for the new school year to begin. I knew that the fall would bring many changes, include the start of my Ed.D. program, and I needed that summer to simply relax - a concept that is now very foreign to me. I was content with staying at home and reading books all day...until my boyfriend suggested that I spend a large portion of the summer with him.

Let me tell you: The pandemic was a blessing for long-distance couples (Although I don't know many long-distance couples, this was definitely the consensus among those I know!) My summer obligations had all been canceled. I had all the free time in the world. Why not go and actually spend time with my boyfriend, to see what it was like to be an actual "normal" couple that lives in the same state? He had just moved to yet another new state, into a townhouse that was larger than any of his previous dwellings, so there was now plenty of room for me and a month's worth of my belongings. I put on the biggest, most protective mask I could find, got on a train, and I was gone until August. I knew that I would face a lot of judgment from family members and friends for my decision to travel during that time - and my subsequent decisions to travel to his place again for Thanksgiving and Christmas later that year, since my parents did not think it was safe for me to travel home. This meant that, during my visits to see my boyfriend, I took a lot of pictures that I kept to myself (it was very hard to do at times; he lives in a place that is very scenic, and I was able to take some beautiful pictures of wildlife and landscapes that I would have loved to have shared with others on Facebook). Eventually, I did post some of those pictures, but I waited until the mid-2021 to do so, after the vaccine had come out, and I was very vague about when the pictures were taken. Like the people in Molla's (2021) article, I prefaced each post with a note about how I had followed "COVID-safe" protocols when I had travelled to avoid what I perceived as potential judgement from others.

In general, since the pandemic began, I have found that I am posting much less content about my life on social media. Quite frankly, it's nobody else's business what I am or am not doing, and I am noticing a downward trend in posts about the personal lives of others, unless it is an announcement of a major life event, like an engagement or the birth of a child. Now that we have more freedom to be out and about, most of us seem to be experiencing a bit of a social media "exhaustion" after using it as one of our primary sources of communication when we had to stay in our homes for such a long time. 

Although social media was derived as a way for people to keep in touch with one another, in the last several years, it has become a platform of bickering and the spread of misinformation. The pandemic itself has caused political divides and rifts within families and friend groups and social media has become a platform in which this bickering continues. As stated by Baym and boyd (2012), "...offline contexts permeate online activities, and online activities bleed endlessly back to reshape what happens online" (p. 327), so it does make sense that our offline interactions with others find a way to trickle into our online interactions with those people, and vice-versa. 

So where does this leave my media ecology in the present moment? Aside from posting on social media much less frequently than I had before the pandemic, I have resorted to using other platforms for staying in touch with my loved ones. I have utilized Zoom and Google Hangouts to frequently catch up with some of my friends from high school. In fact, I have been in touch with them more frequently in last couple of years than I have throughout most of our adult lives. I have also used Zoom and Google Hangouts to play Jackbox games (would highly recommend!) with my immediate family members, and we have created some shared memories and very strange inside jokes in the last couple of years because of these highly-entertaining games. We are using these digital tools to engage in genre of new media participation of "hanging out", as described by Ito et. al (2009), for we are unable to get together physically, but we spend time being together online (and occasionally, somebody will be multitasking, just like with today's youth!)

Unfortunately, the pandemic seems far from over. From the perspective of a person who is greatly interested in educational technology and society's shifts towards and away from social media, I am curious to see how our society's usage of social media sites and collective media ecology will continue to evolve over time.

References

Baym, N. K. & boyd, d. (2012). Socially mediated publicness: An introduction. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 320-329. 

Ito, M., Sonja, B., Matteo, B., boyd, d., Cody, R., Herr, B., Horst, H. A., Lange, P.G., Mahendran, D., Martinez, K., Pascoe, C. J., Perkel, D., Robinson, L., Sims, C., & Tripp, L. (2009). Hanging out, messing around, geeking out: Living and learning with new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Molla, R. (2021, March 1). Posting less, posting more, and tired of it all: How the pandemic has changed social media. Vox. Retrieved January 16, 2022, from https://www.vox.com/recode/22295131/social-media-use-pandemic-covid-19-instagram-tiktok

A New Beginning: My Ed.D.

 

I had to make a visual representation of where I am currently in my career, so, uh, ta da!

I composed the following post for one of my class assignments and decided to re-post it on my lovely EduBlog. Enjoy!

I am very excited to begin this new journey in my educational and professional career. I am most excited to see myself as a student once again, as it has been ten years since I completed my master’s program, and, in that time frame, I have occasionally wondered whether I would approach school differently if I were to be in school at this stage of my life or if I would have a greater appreciation for being a student than I did years ago, when being a student was all I knew, as I had not yet begun my career. With as excited as I am to begin this new chapter, I know that I will face a variety of challenges in the years ahead.

I (Think I Might) Love You, Internet (Even If I Don't Always Like You)

In the past, I've sometimes contemplated how I would explain the concept of the Internet to a person living 100 years ago if I somehow found myself sitting in the past after stumbling into a rip in the space-time continuum. Imagine having to explain the concept of the Internet to people who predate the computer!

"The Internet is a place," I could see myself starting. "I mean, it's not a physical place, but it's not solely in your mind, either. You can physically see it, engage with it, and communicate with almost anybody! Most people in the US have access to portable devices with glowing screens that can connect to the Internet. It's an infinite source of knowledge."

"Indubitably," responds the hypothetical person from the past, who, regardless of time period and region, would definitely use that term, "people in your time must love taking advantage of its infinite knowledge! Everybody must be so intelligent in your time. Oh, it must be divine to come from a most learned civilization of scholars!"

"Yeah...you would think so, but most use the Internet as a source of completely mindless entertainment. Also, much of the 'information' provided by the Internet is unreliable, and people have moved away from reading books. Actually, this guy named Ray Bradbury is going to write a book about this in the 1950s that will predict all of this, so if you want to know more, I'd say read that book and you'll get the idea."

Corona Time in Teachingland

Life in 2020...or is this 2008? Hard to differentiate.

One of my biggest regrets of the past few years has been my complete negligence of maintaining this EduBlog; to be honest, it would have been nice to have more detailed documentation of my teaching life, pre-coronavirus (P.C.?), at my fingertips, for a reminder of my "normal" routine, but I digress. To be honest, I have thought of several ideas for Edublog entries over the years and left those ideas in the drafts, to be written later. Yet here I am, remembering a particular item on the list of study tips that my eighth grade science teacher relayed to us at the beginning of that year: Don't refuse to start a task until the inspiration strikes; it probably never will. You were right, Mrs. M: later never came, and there are seven or eight half-completed (I'm an optimist!) drafts sitting in the queue. But again, I digress.

For right now, I just want to take some time to discuss the changes in the last few weeks: of my routine, of my experience as a teacher, of my state of mind as a human being.

As a side note, please excuse what is likely to be a composition that flows as a stream of consciousness as opposed to a polished piece of writing. Does anybody really want to proof read at 3:00 AM?