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...

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 ...

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,...