I have been very thoughtful about curating my social media threads and interaction. I block those who are highly negative or who respond to my posts in ways that don't make sense or don't understand the intent of my writing. I am creating a Professional Learning/Living Network (PLN) of people I admire, gain inspiration from, and who appropriately challenge who I am and what I do.
I block those who ridicule and demean others with negative language and mistruths. Yes, I've blocked @POTUS and his cronies whose social media often doesn't tell the truth and more often ridicules hard working, good people who are trying to do what is right and good for people. I'm okay with respectful dissent, debate, and discourse, but I'm not okay with lies and making fun of people with name calling and other disrespectful phrases.
When I wake up in the morning, I can quickly look at my Twitter feed to get a lot of really good information, inspiration, and challenge from the wonderful PLN I've developed over the years. The same is true for my Facebook account, an account that I use mostly for personal share and understanding. I've yet to really use Instagram or Snapchat simply because I don't want to have to curate too many threads, and my family has those so if it's important they'll share the post with me.
Good teaching today requires us to help students 13 and over to curate their accounts, talk about them, and learn how to manage those social media accounts and interaction well. For students younger than 13 we can do this teaching through class accounts that are managed by the teacher and protected online share vehicles such as Google classroom or Google apps. We need to also open up worthy, creative tech to young students so they understand what's positively possible on tech, sites that are far more intriguing and creative than the "workbook-on-a-page" sites that so many students utilize too often (in my opinion).
There's tremendous opportunity out there via social media threads, but we won't be able to reach that opportunity if we don't curate our accounts and interact with purpose and good intent.
