Blogging with Brenda

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...

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,...