On Tuesday Feb. 11 2020, our Ed Tech class had a fabulous guest speaker named Jesse Miller, of mediatedreality.com, come and speak to us about online safety and privacy, while promoting education and dialogue surrounding social media use. Unfortunately I had a couple of sick children at home and missed the first part of his presentation. However, what I did see made me feel quite glad that I had grown up without having to worry about  the negative effects of social media and any on line related concerns. Today, it seems like everyone is putting their life story out there for the world to see, without truly recognizing the potential consequences and legalities. When I was growing up, there was no social media. The only thing I used a computer for was to play keystone cops and type out resumes. I didn’t even use it to type out an essay for school as we hand wrote everything. Photographs were the most damaging reminder of anything we did, and even those took a few days to get developed. Today, it seems like you can practically ruin your reputation, your career,  and possibly you life with one or two poorly thought out social media posts. It is truly a terrifying thought and we need to educate ourselves to be able to use this technology both responsibly and effectively and with a dose of common sense.

We also learned about videomaking. Even though there were directions to follow, I am not sure if I could create a video without help. I would definitely need to practice. My partner Lauren and I made a video of her most recent swim meet, but she was not feeling overly comfortable posting it so we chose not to.