This week we had a guest come to present to our class. Jesse Miller joined us via zoom. Jesse was so awesome and super insightful. I enjoyed how much he had to say and was very good at getting his point across while still being very interesting throughout his whole presentation. I learned a lot about what he said and I really enjoyed that he was talking a lot about social media and what that might look like in the classroom or just in your personal life. I thought it was super useful to hear from him and I have a lot of takeaways from his presentation. I liked that he talked about the meme culture, evolving themes of social sharing and normalization in culture, values of privacy in information sharing and discovering health and wellness balance in technology use. I thought these were super important to discuss and are topics that we think of but do not necessarily discuss enough or put enough research into it.

One thing that I enjoyed hearing was Jesse talking about his own experience with social media with his own children. He has a 8 year old and a 15 year old and of course they are at much different ages so the social media limit between them both is very drastic. His 8 year old is not allowed on social media which I think is very fair because it can be so hard to limit what they see on there and I believe it is in their best interest to not introduce it too early. However his 15 year old has started to get a few apps because he believes once they get a bit older it can be beneficial for them to learn all the basics of social media and start to get more familiar with it so they aren’t using it poorly in the future. I agree with his tactics for this but I would definitely monitor the social media of my 15 year old ( which I am sure he does) just because they are still learning and growing as well and we still want to protect them from certain things they may see in the internet as well. Growing up I was not allowed a phone or social media until I was about 16-17 and I remember being so upset because my friends were getting all of that stuff in grade 7, but looking back now I can really appreciate what my parents were doing and I think I was just fine without it. (I am also so grateful I don’t have any old embarrassing Instagram accounts like all my friends do…)

I am so grateful that Jesse was able to present to our class and I learned a lot from him! Thanks Jesse!!

See you next week!