Weekly Blog #3 - Social Media? More Like Asocial Media, Amirite?

This week our presenter was Andy Mead, who is the new President of the Manitoba Remote Learning Centre. This was created to help teachers to deliver remote learning while we are dealing with the pandemic. He spoke about social media in the classroom and how we can use it as teachers.

When digging into this subject, I found this video from Common Sense Education titled Teen Voices: Who Are You On Social Media? There were a few things these students said about that topic that really stuck with me. One student mentioned that we have lost the meaning of what social media was meant to be, which was initially to connect with other people. Now it is about showing off what you think is the best version of yourself. I think this is because of social media influencers, who make it seem like what the show on social media is their entire lives, which as an adult I know is not true. But for a teenager, that is a much harder thing to discover. As another student in the video says, they started posting things only for the likes, and then got anxious over how many likes they were going to get. I feel like kids already have enough things to worry about when growing up, this is just another thing to add to that.

Another thing I just discovered about social media that was brought up in this video was the idea of having a "spam" account. This is where someone has a main account, where they only post a few good pictures, but then have a backup account where they just dump tons and tons of pictures. I think this is something where teens believe they are safe because they aren't posting these to their main account, but that means these pictures of them are still floating around on the internet. This can be very dangerous for their future. These are the things we need to teach kids about using social media.

To end, I recently watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix. One thing that really stuck with me and connected with our class talks of social media was how the people who were heavily involved with social media platforms described how they were going to let their children use social media. One person said that they were not going to allow their kids to use social media and have a cell phone until they were 16. I think this is like the "sticking your head in the sand". Trying to not let your kids use this won't be very helpful when all their friends are using them. And then to add to that, they are going to feel like they are behind their friends when they finally get it and will probably have an even harder time acclimatizing. I thought the next person had the best solution. They said they would frequently talk to their kids about social media and would make sure to limit their screen time. I think this is a great way to get kids into social media without letting them go crazy, and something I would plan on doing in my teaching future.