Blog 4

In my early years of middle school, I got my first social media platform, Instagram, and quickly after that, I got Snapchat and TikTok. It wasn't till later that I got Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. In my younger years, with just Snapchat and Instagram, I found it helpful to stay in touch with my friends and what was trending at the time. Having access to Snapchat and Instagram, I grew my circle of friends from a group of people who were in my classes to a lot of people that I didn't have in my classes. These platforms allowed me to see fun trends and events that I was interested in at that age. Once I had all the platforms, I was able to keep in touch with more than just my school friends, but with my hometown community. These platforms can still, to this day, keep me in touch with all my friends and the local community, and they can also inspire me with new ideas as well.

Growing up, I think my elementary school was a digitally rich school. We had several computer labs where all the kids were taught how to use them, as well as a class on how to make the news production every morning. But, as I aged and got to middle school, the use of technology went down. We did have computer labs, but we did not use them nearly as much as we did in elementary school. But once COVID-19 happened, the middle school and high school both were forced to increase the amount of technology that they have, but also how they used it. Since the first year after COVID-19, half of the students were able to take the year online on Zoom. This not only allowed the students to get familiar with Zoom but also helped the teacher become technology savvy. I feel that I had 4 years in high school with heavy technology use, and I became very familiar with lots of the tech software that is being used in college. I am grateful that I had those years that helped familiarize myself with technology.

In my experience with group assignments, I have had some good groups in my past, but I have heard of horror stories from some of my friends about really bad group projects, so I do know they exist. I personally dislike doing group projects, not because I can't work with others, I love socializing and working in groups, but I don't like having to only do one part of the project and not learning about the other 3/4ths of the assignments. Typically, that is how group projects go, you divide the different sections op which causes you to only learn the one section that you made and not the others. Software that I like is Khan Academy, Kahoot, a nd Quizlet, and I would implement these software to help back up the knowledge that was taught to them in class. For example, in my third-grade class, we are learning how to count money. I would use a Khan Academy assignment as homework to back up what I taught them.