Technology seems to find us today at every turn. I, of course, enjoy many of the encounters I have in my daily use of technology, but I can grow frustrated with my relationship to technology and social media. I used to be very good about limiting my time on social media, but I found that I was disconnected from my peers as they use social media as means of communication. After a social media-free period of about six months, I got back into using Instagram. It is now the only social networking app that I use on a daily basis. I can find Instagram to be quite a distraction at times, and I am working on replacing the time I would spend scrolling with reading or some sort of craft (my newest addition being crochet!).
I use mostly traditional means of organization when it comes to both personal and academic organization. However, I do use a google calendar to schedule appointments and commitments, because I like to enable the setting that sends a reminder 30 minutes before. I also use the university library online only because I am a rural student and would have to drive three hours to go in person. Another online tool I use for academic purposes is google docs. I like that everything saves automatically and that I can easily share documents with others. I label all of my documents with the class name first, so if I am searching for a document from a specific class I can search the class name and all of my work comes up.
A tool I frequently used for my job as a SPED EA is Canva. I was able to create activities for my student and find and edit templates to use for posters/displays to decorate our classroom with. One activity I created was for pre-writing skills where I used a dotted line feature to make the shapes we were working on, printed, laminated and cut the sheet out, and used it over and over again with a dry-erase marker. I made a similar activity for my student to practice writing their name using a dotted line font, and two more using the same font one for the alphabet and one for numbers.
I am eager to learn about more technological tools that will support me as a teacher, and student outcomes!
Hi Raise,
A lot of my friends are beginning are beginning to delete Instagram because they find it as too much of a distraction for them. I was wondering if you found that time away beneficial for you, as I am questioning whether I should follow my friends in unplugging or not. Also, I love the prewriting skills sheets that you made.
Thanks! I really found the time away beneficial for me, because when I came back I had a much better grasp on how much time I was spending on the app, and I created new routines where social media was not present so I found myself reaching for a book more than my phone. Another thing that helped me was to remove the apps from my homescreen, because my thumb wasn’t automatically clicking on social media apps.
I hope that helps!