I found Jesse Miller’s presentation to be really interesting. I’m glad that he approached social media and the internet as aspects of our lives that we can’t just ignore in the classroom. I see a lot of people talking about phones and what to do to manage them. Phones are definitely a concern for me, but I agree that taking them away from students is a bit too extreme. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with doing that, and frankly I think it’s an overreach of a teacher’s power. Taking phones has the potential to affect student attendance and students could be using them in good faith or as a coping mechanism. I think phones are something that teachers should out-compete rather than something that teachers need to separate from students.

I found the self-searching to be a pretty interesting exercise. I’ve done it a fair amount of times with my deadname and have struggled to find anything that actually relates to me. My name was pretty generic and was shared with some cricket superstar. Hard to find any information about myself with all the results relating to him taking up all the space. Also a bit of an existential experience, I don’t think I’ll ever get to a “suggested search: desktop wallpaper” level of fame of popularity ever. There’s also a local actor who shares that name. I find it a bit strange that I could have watched a commercial featuring someone who lives on the island and had the same name as me.

Searching up my actual name is interesting. There’s definitely less results and the people who show up are just other normal people. I’m curious if more results relating to me will start showing up as a create an online presence while going by my preferred name. It’s definitely comforting to have that element of control too. All of my other online presences use usernames that aren’t related to me. I don’t really have anything I’m concerned about students or parents seeing, but having the comfort of it being pretty inaccessible is nice.