When I was younger, I avoided social media like the plague. I identified as a "not-like-other-girls" "cool girl" with no interest in the shallow frivolities of Instagram. My principled stand was impressive to no one. I watched--but didn't upload--to YouTube, and kept up with content creators by using Twitter (RIP). I was a consumer, not a contributor, and you'd be hard-pressed to find any record of me online beyond my voting records. Only now, as a nostalgic 20-something, do I have the desire to keep up with my old high school buddies--just in time for them to decide that social media is toxic. C'est la vie. Now I have Instagram because of this class, and I use Reddit to keep track of other teachers and wannabes. Social media is great for a lot of the same reasons that it's terrible--it allows you to gauge the unfiltered thoughts of other people, where strangers vent and whine and often say unkind things to each other. It also allows you to understand some of the real, unspeakable issues with education, which is a much more political field than it should be.

When I was in kindergarten, my school was supplied with several cutting-edge desktops in a computer lab. Over the course of my education, I watched as those resplendent computers moldered from top-of-the-line to unusably obsolete. One issue with my school system, on top of the aging tech, was that the school system was extremely paranoid about students partaking in any unseemly/inappropriate/entertaining media. Any sites that involved a game, or video, or included any words on the "banned" list, didn't make it through. NPR was blocked, for Heaven's sake. One time I had an in-class assignment where I had to write an argument for comprehensive sex ed for a dual enrollment class, and I couldn't source a single unblocked website. I was lucky that I had a supportive family at home with modest access to technology. It was on my own home computer that I developed the skills I would need later for college.

It's hard for me to imagine tech being so available in a K-12 context like the one I'll likely be teaching in. My teachers' use of technology in the classroom was normally limited to PowerPoint--maybe a Quizlet if we were lucky. Watching Ms. Idam use Padlet or Miro Board is the first inkling I've had in using technology to engage students. Also, I'll expect my students to be able to work on shared documents, just like I did in school (from a home computer). I picture myself using annotating features in Google Docs and Word to help students with rough drafts.

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