The first debate for week 2 was if social media was ruining childhood. I have mixed feelings about this topic, most of the debate topics I found that I land somewhere in the middle rather than firmly on one side or the other. For this topic, I find that I also land somewhere in the middle. In “Is social media ruining our kids?” the author made some good points about with the rise of social media, and how it is affecting kids and teens. One point that a classmate made is that kids are exposed to things way too early and having to deal with things that as a kid should not have to deal with.

On the other side of the debate in “Social Media in Education: Can they improve the learning?” the author in talking about how social media can improve learning. In the article it mentions a few reasons why social media is useful however most of the reasons can also be reasons why it’s not usually a good thing. For example, the first point that the author makes is that social media encourages communication and collaboration, as is does help with communication it also allows for bad communication such as bullying. And worse yet, it makes it much harder for other people to miss what is going on.

For me personally I feel the social media doesn’t improve education, especially in the younger grades, it might help more for older grades but for younger grades I don’t think that it is helpful. When I was a kid, I was a bit of a sheltered child and I wasn’t exposed to social media at all really until I was about 13, meaning my parents didn’t have any social media, so I wasn’t posted anywhere, and I didn’t have any kind of contact with things that where being spread around on social media. This helped me understand the affect that social media has on me, as I have gotten older, I have gained a distaste for social media, it has a tendency to have negative effects for my mental health and I just don’t need to know all the things that are on social media.

In the second half of this class, we debated if schools should be allowed to use surveillance online to make sure students are safe. I will start off by saying that I feel very strongly that schools should not be allowed to survey students online. In this article, the author discusses how schools are using technology to make sure students are following rules to stop the spread of covid 19. I understand how this might seem like a good idea, but it seems like a bad idea to me. I feel like this is an invasion of privacy and I think that there are better ways to deal with this then to be constantly tracking students. One of the reasons I think this is a bad idea is that if that information gets into the wrong hands, students’ safety is being put at risk and since they are being tracked at all times, if someone wanted to hurt a student, they could easily find them.

On the other side of this debate there was this article that stood out to me. One of the main points that the author makes is that schools should make a culture that everyone looks out for each other and helps out when they see something that isn’t right. This idea might seem a little extreme, however, I think that schools should be focusing more on the root of the problem rather than just what is happening on the surface. Schools should be making an environment that students feel safe to talk about what is going on rather than the school “spying” on them and confronting them about what they find. Also, schools could be spending the money that they would be on this technology and instead spend it on hiring more teachers and guidance counselors to improve the quality of the school.