My history with social media has reached both extremes of the usage spectrum. I recall first accessing Facebook sometime in Grade 10, 2008/09. What followed was a time period of posting inane status updates, usually following the pattern of “Brayden Ursaki is feeling __________”, which I believe was the default prompt at the time. Beyond high school, my social media usage completely flipped. I began to use it for consumption purposes almost exclusively, only posting periodically, and certainly NOT anything to do with status updates. Today, I don’t post anything at all… anything that involves me, my wife posts and tags me in.

Other social media sites have held my attention just briefly. I created an Instagram account and abandoned it shortly thereafter, not quite seeing the relevance of it compared to Facebook at the time. Snapchat was a nifty tool for a time, but it, too, ended up being abandoned. I discovered Reddit sometime in university, but have used it exclusively for viewing conversations and discussions.

Twitter is the only other social media tool I have maintained some form of evident activity. I’ve made some posts related to promoting activities going on in my classroom, as well as made use of likes, bookmarks, and retweets. It’s Twitter that I use as a teacher tool, finding a plethora of strategies, ideas, and resources.

In case it isn’t apparent by this point, I’m something of a social media ghost, or Roz from Monsters, Inc.: always watching. Thus, the requirements of this course, to actively use social media consistently, will be a bit of a refresher. I’ll just make sure to keep the inane posts to a minimum.