Jesse Miller came in this week to give an insightful lecture on technology use in the classroom. While he covered some aspects of technology that we covered an I reflected on last week, I found his thoughts around cell phone usage in the classroom quite helpful. I believe cell phones will be something educators will be battling with for a very long time, so coming up with strategies to minimize ‘personal’ time on cell phones in classrooms is very important. I am also someone who is in favour of having cell phones in class– however they need to be used appropriately which of course is the challenge. With English and Physical and Health Education as my teachable subjects, I feel that I should be able to nullify cell phones while in PHE, however it becomes trickier when in an English classroom. In an ideal world, students phones would only be able to access relevant apps and websites while in class however this technology does not quite exist yet and it would be a challenge to convince students to turn their phones into a– lets call it “school mode”.
Jesse also spoke on privacy and security for your online presence which I touched on a bit last week. One interesting difference was his point about seeing students online and how to deal with that. While I would never follow or accept a follow request from one of my students, it is possible that a student could show up on one of my socials. My first instinct should always be to avoid any sort of online interaction with the student, and if the problem persists I would look at my account and privacy settings to see if I could avoid seeing posts from these students.