Blogging with Brenda

At the start of 2021, I set out several goals for myself. One of them was to become more mindful with eating and what it was I ate. I downloaded Noom and one of the terms I learned was "fog eating," where you eat without awareness. I decided to track my screen time for the past three days and I think I also am guilty of fog scrolling, where I'm on my phone without awareness. I already had a feeling this was true, but looking at the actual breakdown of my time was proof that something deeper was happening. Personal Images My iPhone has a Screen Time feature which allowed me to complete this tracking. I can also set up app limits within the feature, which I have before, but I frequently ignore. Starting on Wednesday, April 21st, I spent six hours and fifty minutes on my phone. I had a busy day at school on Wednesday, and my time online didn't start to really go up until about 3 to 4pm. I was home that day by 5pm as you can see by the larger spike at that time. When I g...

I don't know if it's my age or unresolved teenaged angst, but it has always bothered me when I hear complaints about teenagers and how well they know social media, but are completely lost when it comes to educational technology or everyday activities. Maybe it's because I'm also someone that spends an incredible amount of time on my phone, but I empathize with my kids and their relationship to digital media. It's more difficult to learn a tool than it is a social media app since that's what we've known for the bulk of our lives. Instead of fighting the technology and the lack of knowledge on it, I'm doing my best to welcome and build on it, especially given the content I teach.  In a 2010 article , Howard Rheingold mentions five interconnected social media literacies to become a "critical consumer of digital media." They are:  Attention Participation Collaboration Network Awareness Critical Consumption While all of these literacies are importan...

When I was 11, my older cousins became my sitters. Whenever my mom had to work overtime, or late into the night, I would stay over at their house and the time was spent online. One of my favorite things to do would be to watch them go online, log into Myspace, and spend hours creating their profile pages, selecting their top friends, and playing games the site offered. Soon enough, they offered to make me my own account. I was obviously not 13 at the time, but we just changed my birth year from 1997 to 1990. Simple. Pretty much everyone in my 5th-grade class was doing the same by the time this happened. I was just the one that joined late. Danah Boyd stated, "on the internet, every child is 14." I honestly think every child on the internet is at least 18, if not older. CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) is meant to "protect students from online predation, cyberbullying, and inappropriate content." Filters are applied and vary depending on the student'...

What do you do when you have an entire week off from work and/or school? For me, spring break was a time to do very little. During the school year, I do far too much so over break I turned my brain off and opened my favorite apps, including Instagram.  Image Source: Personal Instagram Post On my personal Instagram, I very rarely post. I mainly share what I do in my Story, which is only available for 24 hours. On one's Instagram Story, one can see how many viewers for that post there were and who they were. I can't lie - I look to see who viewed my story. Reflecting on my last 25 posts on Instagram, they are either related to my dog, my boyfriend, a throwback picture, or a special moment. These go back to 2018, going to show how few posts I make. Below are two of my favorite pictures that I've posted recently. The first is from October 3, 2020. Aaron, my boyfriend, and I went to Goebbert's Pumpkin Patch. It was apparently National Boyfriend's Day, but my caption was ...

I wasn't shocked when I found out I have 168 reused passwords upon looking at my Google account's password checkup. I simply do not have the capacity to remember different passwords, and sure Google can save my passwords, but really, I can't even trust Google anymore as seen with my last blog post . So, I just silently resign and reuse my passwords to make my life easier. However, I was shocked to find out only one of my accounts was compromised while checking if I have been pwned and it was an account I barely use. My Canva account was found in the May 2019 breach, but I'm surprised that I've only been involved in one breach considering how little I have paid attention to online security. If I haven't paid much attention to my online security, I can only imagine how much my own students pay attention to theirs. Image Source: Twitter, @Maechez1 J Sterling Morton District 201, has policies when it comes to the acceptable use of technology. There are two sections...

Students can be the greatest teachers. I love learning new ideas from them. Sometimes though, what they share with me worries me. Teaching Civics gives me the opportunity to talk about the news and current events with my students pretty much on a daily basis. In those conversations, I get to find out what they listen to or read to find out about this information. After exploring the topic of algorithms this week, I started questioning my own understanding of how we get our information, especially those that are often on social media sites, myself included. Image Source: ABC News I listened to an episode of a podcast called  Factually! with Adam Conover on the biases of search engines, like Google, where he interviewed UCLA Professor Safiya Noble. In the episode, Noble mentions that Google became, "the people's public library." Anyone and everyone can access it at any given time, and for most, this has become the go-to site for finding information. "Just Google it,...

Within my Professional Learning Network (PLN) at work, I feel I have the most to learn and grow cognitively . Since I don't have as much experience as the others in my PLN with teaching, I definitely spend the most time asking questions on how to do things and listening to what has or hasn't worked. The PLN that I mostly work with is the one at my school, where it's three other teachers apart from myself that teach Civics and Economics. Our PLN was new starting last school year, and in my opinion, we grew close to one another because of the shared struggles of teaching a new class and for some of us, for the first time in the building. Looking at this infographic on where I think I fit within my PLN, I can confidently say we're all on Stage 7: Confidant . We've spent time outside of school together, we each lunch together on occasion, and we lean on each other for support both professionally and personally. The tough times we experienced together last year brought ...

Hi everyone! I am so excited to write my very first blog post and share it publically. I swear, I've attempted to create a blog before. It has never been successful, but this time is different! My name is Brenda Lo pez and I use she/her pronouns. I'm a second-year social science teacher at Morton East High School in Cicero, Illinois. Currently, I teach semester-long classes. I mainly teach Civics and Economics to seniors, and an elective for sophomores, juniors, and seniors titled Modern World History. I work at my alma mater and graduated from this school in 2015. Afterward, for my undergraduate degree, I attended the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and graduated in 2019. I am a co-sponsor for a club at Morton East called Operation Snowball, a club that I was a member of when I was a student at Morton. The club's mission itself is to have our students create healthy and positive relationships with each other, and most importantly within themselves. Everything in my...