To my great embarrassment as a 14 year old trying to fit in with my friends, my family was resistant to letting me download Instagram. When I eventually became active on the platform, my first username was ‘kitkat234’ because my family did not want me to post anything that could potentially trace back to me or my identity. I was reminded almost daily that putting content online meant it was there forever- even on apps like Snapchat that claimed to delete photos after 10 seconds. Any time I posted a photo with people in it, I texted them individually to get their consent.
Ten years later and I feel much more desensitized to the potentially dangerous side of social media. My Instagram handle is my first and last name, I have a LinkedIn account to update my connections about major life milestones, and I have a friends only Instagram page where I post my life updates – the good, bad, and ugly. Jesse’s presentation brought me back to when I was 13 years old and had virtually no digital footprint. It terrifies me that there is so much information about me online for people I do not know to potentially see. Though I firmly believe I have never posted anything that others could view as offensive and problematic, any future educator needs to be aware that social climates change. A post that seems hilarious now could turn into a huge problem ten years down the road.
An extreme example of this is a girl from my Queen’s University graduating class. In 2023, I attended a debate for the Arts and Sciences Commission’s presidential election. Partway through the debate, most audience members including myself received an anonymous AirDrop – a picture, screenshotted from Snapchat in 2016, of one of the candidates with black paint on her face holding a watermelon. The text she had included on the photo is considered highly offensive and I do not want to write it down, but I have attached a news article for anyone wanting more context. She was forced to withdraw from the election, and watch her aspirations as a politician go up in smoke. I Googled her name while writing this post, and the top five articles all relate to this scandal.
I’m not saying I agree with my classmate’s actions nine years ago – I was horrified to see this image pop up on my phone – but I can’t help but feel bad for her. Something she posted without fully understanding what she was saying will now haunt her for life.
I’ve always understood that I need to be careful of what I post – but as an aspiring educator, some responsibility falls on me to educate children about how to be appropriate citizens in a digital society. This task is daunting because the online world is constantly changing. For instance, Jesse talked about the rise of AI and the new risks we are all faced with because of this software. When Jesse told our class the story of a student who used AI to create fake nudes of their teacher, I realized that I do not know nearly enough about how to promote the safe use of AI in my classroom. During my time as a teacher, I anticipate having to educate my students about technologies and websites that have yet to be created.
These last few years I have been trying to pretend that AI does not exist. Most of my friends used Chat GPT to help them at some point in undergrad, but I did not want to acknowledge that it was real. My first semester at UVic made me realize that my future profession carries a responsibility to educate myself about any type of technology my students may be using, and Jesse’s lecture on Friday reinforced the importance of doing so. AI and internet safety scare me, but what scares me more is the thought of one of my students ruining their life over something that I could have prevented through high-quality education. Jesse made a good point that AI today was Google in 2003 – many people were scared of Google when it first came out, much like we are wary of AI today. However, Google has become embedded in almost everything we do as a society and has become a very productive force within education. I believe that AI has potential to achieve very positive things within an elementary school classroom, if educators are given the guidance to equip students on how to effectively use the technology.
Some things I wish everybody knew that I learned in Jesse’s presentation:
- Snapchat saves everything- including the drafts you never end up sending.
- If you ever need a student’s contact information for something school-related, put it into the Notes app: don’t make them a contact on your phone, because then it will start suggesting you follow each other on various social media.
- Digital media literacy is not just a parent’s domain: it should be reinforced in all areas of a young person’s life.
- Screenshotting information as a way of leveraging it over somebody could be illegal, depending on the context.
Thank you for bringing Jesse in to our classroom- I learned so much from his presentation and I am so much more motivated now to take time to go over digital literacy and safety with my future students.