My Experience with Social Media!

Social media has been a huge part of my life for upwards of 9 years. I started on Instagram when I was about 12 years old and my online life exploded from there. You might be thinking 12? Don’t you have to be at least 13 to join Instagram? Yes, but clearly there are ways to get around that. It was as easy as entering a different birth year and I was in. Looking back now, I see how dangerous that was. I would get follow requests from people I didn’t know, but accept them cause the only thing I thought of was “yay another follower”. After being on Instagram for a bit, I started to expand. I created Snapchat, Facebook, and TikTok accounts. Snapchat was huge for me, I loved being able to instantly send people photos and videos and have them disappear after just a few seconds. I used Facebook mainly for connecting with family and close friends. I loved posting my life! Selfies, sports photos, pictures with my friends, and of my pets. I feel now that I am older and wiser, social media has a lot of positives as well as negatives. The main positive for me is connection. It’s a quick and easy way to keep friends and family in the loop and show off accomplishments. The main negative is privacy. It is so important to understand that the things you post will ALWAYS be there and have the potential to get into the wrong person’s hands.

With the knowledge of social media safely I have now, I feel very comfortable with the idea of creating a professional teacher social media account. I see it as a great way to keep parents, colleagues, and students up to date and involved in a way that is different than your conventional mass email. I will be able to post photos and videos of activities and lessons done in my class and announcements about what’s to come. I understand the importance of keeping the content on this account strictly professional and only posting students’ faces if absolutely necessary and with parental consent. I look forward to bringing my professional and social media worlds together and seeing all the opportunities that come with it!