Tech Class Reflection - Week Two

Let me introduce myself. I’m Kevin. I’ve spent a bit over 25 years working as an engineering in manufacturing. I was burned out and when I fell into a reorganization, my wife encouraged me to go to school to become a teacher. So that’s why I’m here. My wife and I have two sons, both in college. They were both three sport athletes in high school, so much of our time was spent with those activities. Now that the evenings are free again, I’m getting back into being a sports official as a way to stay connected to at least one sport I enjoyed.

So, for this blog entry I am supposed to reflect on social media and give my thoughts. I find this to be a very uncomfortable task.

My distress comes from a few different areas. First and foremost, I’m not the type of person that writes things quickly. I stew over my thoughts and work very hard to craft my writings in a manner that conveys my ideas and follows grammatical norms. When my name is connected to a work that is permanent and public (like blog posts), I struggle to ensure that the work is something I am proud to have represent me. Usually that means that simple writings consume significant time as I check style, spelling and context. This task becomes even more difficult when I try to write for an unknown audience. Not knowing the audience, I don’t know what I can assume they know and what they won’t. Sometimes this leads me to overexplaining or leaving out some information that some people need.

Another thing I don’t like about this communication method is the lack of feedback. In person, you can check for understanding and adapt your delivery as needed to help fine-tune the communication process. In social media posts, this feedback is lacking. So I can be putting information out there, but if people aren’t getting my point I’m not really communicating – I’m just making noise. There’s enough noise out there, I don’t want to add to it.

With this as a background, you can probably imagine that I’m not a user of social media. I got a Facebook account because I needed it for a volunteer group I was working on. That group stopped using it, so I did too.

We were also asked to read this article https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/04/22/my-favorite-teachers-use-social-media-a.html. The student implies that if teachers want their students to do the work, they need to get on social media so the teachers presence will remind the student to get to work. I know I’ll need to deal with this type of attitude, but I don’t think I’ll play into it. As an educator, one of my roles is to help students become adults, not necessarily to enable their juvenile activities.

I expect to use some sort of portal to communicate with the students and parents, but I plan to keep to district run systems. I don’t expect I’ll be tweeting or blogging for my students or parents. Like I said, there’s enough noise in the social media space. I don’t wan to add to it. I’m sure I’ll use technology in some manner – graphing programs, videos and the like.

That’s about it for now.         

Kevin