You can judge, it’s ok

There is something about being asked to consider my daily tech habits that instantly makes me nervous and a little ashamed. We all know that being on our devices all day isn’t great for us, but so much of our lives, especially as students and teachers, relies on the digital world. Okay, that was my short justification for my phone usage, so let’s rip the band-aid off and dig into what tech I use on the daily.

My most shameful (largely self-induced) tech usage revolves around the use social media for entertainment. Granted, some of this entertainment also involves communicating with friends, so perhaps that makes it a little more acceptable?

• Snapchat: mostly used for sending video messages to friends when I’m too lazy to type, or when the story is just too long to type. I guess I could always call…
• Instagram: houses the endless strings of memes my friends and I send back and forth, which actually accounts for a good amount of the communication between some of us. I do post on my story and feed occasionally of things that are happening with my kids and I. Kinda keeps people in the loop of what’s going on with us.
• Facebook: Ole trusty FB. Honestly, it’s mostly for memories of when my kiddos were younger, checking the commuter page to see how the highway to Regina is, and sharing ridiculous things that come across my feed.
• TikTok: Doom scrolling central. Sure, I catch the odd news-ish thing on here, but it mostly just satisfies my interest in miniature cows and provides a few laughs.

There is some overlap between entertainment and academic on Snapchat, ID, FB, and TikTok. Typically this happens more accidentally during a boredom scrolling session, but there are some great ideas for teachers floating around on the internet. One of my personal favourites is call-and-respond classroom management ideas. I came across one before Christmas that I used in my Kindergarten class.

Teacher: Run, run, as fast as you can

Students: You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.

Do you have any favourite teacher-tok pages? If you do, I’d love to hear about them!!