Reflections of a Hopeful Teacher

  Image courtesy of Adobe Stock The Positive Aspects of Social Media for Youth In the slideshow presentation , which features excerpts from her book, It's Complicated , Dana Boyd discusses how social media has replaced shopping malls, Drive-Ins, and land telephone lines as outlets where youth could express themselves and have some independence. In general, the aforementioned channels were unsupervised even if there was a pact of trust established between parents and kids. I know from anecdote and experience that some conversations and activities that occurred between teenagers in these venues would not have been approved by parents. I'm sure that was true in 2010 when Boyd published her slideshow, and it's still true today. The Negative Aspects of Social Media for Youth In her excerpts, Boyd largely discusses the socializing benefits of social media, which as my memory and experience recall, were its original purpose. As with the kids, I used  Facebook  to stay in touch w...

  Image courtesy of VectorStock My Former Views About Technology and Use of It in the Classroom My former views about technology were that youth and adults rely on it too much for entertainment, information, social interaction, body image, and the list goes on. When they aren't on computers or phones for the aforementioned reasons, they're plugging away for school work or their professions. I believe these two sets of habits of leave many people exhausted without always realizing why. I was one of those people. When I completed my digital map, I saw that my online engagements were limited to entertainment (music on  YouTube  being quite a staple for me) and work - lots of work on applications like  GMail  and  Google Classroom ). I had barely begun to explore valuable education platforms ( Padlet  and  Jamboard  rarely got used) and had scattered experience integrating assistive technology. This was partly due to low confidence and an unstabl...

  Image Courtesy of Vecteezy Data Mining My Name 💣 When I enlisted on a data mine of my name, I was skeptical because 1) I had blocked my information on " Been Verified " and 2) a previous search of myself on Facebook and Google had previously yielded no results; both of these had been concerns of mine as I don't want students to find me online. To get started on my search, I looked at a list of  sites  provided by Nicole Zumpano and was skeptical of several as I don't interact on them (i.e.  Twitter/X and  YouTube ), or I haven't established an account with them (i.e.  LinkedIn ). I had previously searched  My Life  and yielded no results. Nevertheless, I decided to begin with a site that brought back a lot of hits when I had searched for old friends. This site was  Intelius . When I got to the homepage, I saw the image below.  Leon, Jennifer. "Look up Anyone!" Intelius, www.intelius.com.  Naturally, I typed in my first name, la...

  Image courtesy of Pexels Five Factors The first personality test I completed was the  Five-Factor Test.  This test measures individuals on the following five personality components: Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Openness, and Neuroticism. Screenshots of my results are below with an explanation that follows.  Image Source: Property of Author Image Source: Property of Author Image Source: Property of Author   Image Source: Property of Author   Image Source: Property of Author   Explanation of Results As one can note from the images above, I scored slightly low as an extravert, very high in openness to experience and conscientiousness and moderately high in agreeableness and neuroticism. One might say that these results are a paradox, but being highly aware of myself (in the midst of healing), I'm not surprised at all. I've always been on the "shy" and hesitant end of the social spectrum and prefer small group interactions and limited ...

  Image Source: Property of Owner When reflecting on the adaptive needs of the diverse learners I've taught throughout the last decade, my students have fallen into several categories; some of these brackets include struggling readers, struggling writers, the hearing impaired, emotionally/behaviorally challenged, and the verbally challenged (and of course, students fit into multiple categories in some cases). Thankfully, no matter which setting I've taught in, one tool my students have always had access to was a Google Chromebook. In the next section, I will focus on five adaptive features that Google Chromebooks have for students with the challenges I listed above and describe each one. Text-to-Speech Google has two text-to-speech options. One is located second in the "Start" menu under "Accessibility." After clicking on "Accessibility," one would select "Select to Speak." Once this option is activated, the user would see a green check ...