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Social Media Society...A Continuation on Mobile Devices

Flashback to 2005, I was still in high school and MySpace was the place to be.   Friends would get upset with you if they weren’t in your “top 8”, you would spend hours decorating your profile and finding the perfect song, and it was all about finding the perfect angles for your profile mirror picture.   This was all done on your family’s PC—this was the beginning of online social media. It was also around this time that “The Facebook” became just "Facebook" and was opened up to the public.   Fast forward about five years to late 2010 and you have the beginnings of Instagram.   Social media was blowing up exponentially as more and more people started getting smartphones that enabled them to have social media constantly at their fingertips. But, what makes the social media realm so appealing?   How is it affecting us?   What effects does social media have on our children?     According to a July 2017 The Telegraph article,...
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Mobile Devices in the Classroom

Over the past 6 years that I have been teaching, I have seen the roles of mobile phones in the classroom change drastically. My first few years we had the policy “off and away until the end of the day.” That meant that students had to keep their mobile phones in their lockers throughout the school day. Then, things changed a few years ago when my school became a “bring your own technology” school. We had a traffic light system in place to indicate to students when it was appropriate to be on their phones and when it wasn’t.   Some teachers enforced the policy, some did not.   Over the past few years, mobile phone usage in the classroom has drastically increased, and unfortunately, often times students are not utilizing their devices for educational purposes, but instead for social media, and talking to friends.   This has led to many teachers banning the use of phones in the classroom.   But what does the research say--how do students feel about ha...
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What Would Sherry Turkle Say?

Mobile devices certainly offer the modern-day person a wide range of affordances.   Starting out with the brick phones (Zach Morris style) of the 80s and early-90s, to the unbreakable Nokia where you could really only play snake, to flip phones with the grainy cameras, and finally to the smart phones which we rely on for everything these days.   But are phones changing the way humans communicate?   What about in the classroom, are phones becoming major distractions in the academia setting?   Sherry Turkle would say yes. But she does mention some benefits of mobile devices in social settings.   Turkle would completely agree that phones are changing the way we communicate. Living in a world where “nearly 95% of Americans have at least one cell phone” (NBC Learn), mobile devices have certainly impacted us, and our daily routines, such as conversations, in a plethora of ways.    Turkle says “Eighty-nine percent of Americans say that during ...
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