Closed

My future son-in-law is in the military, and he says our current self-isolating situation is very similar to being deployed. When deployed, you have limits to who you can interact with and many rules in how you can interact. It is a way to keep everyone safe in uncontrollable situations. That has been my way of running my classroom, particularly in the middle school years. I direct students to resources and people, though they are allowed to do research online while supervised. The goal is to avoid them encountering information or situations that are too mature for them to understand and thereby try to keep them safe in an uncontrollable situation. For middle school students, our security limits some of their search ability, and we hope that at home, their parents monitor their computer usage. Yes, they are taught digital literacy, but their maturity in employing their lessons are sometimes less than required. Older students have had years of digital literacy pounded into them and are also not as gullible, so my ‘dictates’ become more open. It is similar to the graphic displayed in the class blog, but a little more closed.

Roberts (2019) Open Learning Continuum

I recognize that increasing my Personal Learning Network has led to me interesting viewpoints and resources, but there is also a lot of crap out there that I have had to try remove from my feeds. I am not convinced social media is a safe space for our students. Not just about the crap, but there are those online looking to prey on young people. I am not comfortable being the person who encouraged my students to participate in social media because I would feel responsible if they encountered something inappropriate or scary because of my recommendation. Google classroom has a controlled ‘social media’ type of interaction, though Google’s privacy when not within Google Suite for Education (formerly Google Apps for Education or GAFE) is questionable. (Actually, I am leery of them on behalf of my students even within G Suite.) So as much as I would like to embrace the idea of students interacting with others in social media, I am going to control my students’ situation by directing them to appropriate resources and keep them in self-isolation in terms of social media.