May 15, 2023 – Mme Blair Dueck

I remember in 2006, sitting in Tim Horton’s with another first-year teacher talking about Facebook. Something we had just learned about. Can you imagine being a part of this? What could this possibly mean for a teacher? Students would see everything we do? This is a bad idea!

Fast forward a few months, I too made a Facebook account and still have it today. I am a fairly private person and am not super excited about sharing my life on social media. I do post occasionally. I enjoy the platform for keeping up with friends I don’t often see and seeing their children grow…even though I rarely post pictures of my own. I have strict rules about accepting friend requests, especially from students. Only if they have graduated high school, I will accept them as friends. I also don’t accept students’ parents as friends. It’s my attempt to keep my work and personal life a little separate.

I also have Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest being my most go to platforms. I began using Twitter when I took EC&I 834 with Katia, a year and a half ago. This is where I first realized the connections you can make with educators, teaching ideas, and many other education related sources. I haven’t yet started using it regularly however, I can see how you could build a community of Twitter.

Instagram, I use for connecting with friends and following other teachers and other personal interest items. This is platform I turn to the most often to scroll through, which can be a time waster for sure!

I remember hearing about Pinterest early in my teaching career. My colleagues strongly suggested that I don’t check it out until report cards were over so I would never get my report cards written. It too has a lot of information. I enjoy using it for teaching ideas, family picture outfit suggestions, and how to hang pictures on my wall just to name a few. I use this platform often when looking for ideas for any kind.

After reading this week’s articles about building a PLN, Professional Learning Network, I am inspired to use these tools in a different way. This is the way I have been using Twitter not realizing what I was doing. PLN, makes me think about Edsby groups I am apart of and how we use the groups to ask questions and support colleagues within our school division.

My relationship with social media is mostly positive as I have set boundaries for myself and how I would like to connect with others and who I would like to connect with. The biggest negative for me would be the time I can waste “scrolling” when there are other things I should be doing.

A green thumb, I do not have! I have always loved the idea of having flowers and a vegetable garden in my yard. Each year, I chose the flowers that I think are the prettiest, a variety of vegetables seeds and a few veggie plants and away I go. Some survive better than others. My approach to yard maintenance is: weed when I see weeds, cut the grass when it gets long and water when I have time. As you can see, no science involved.

A year ago, at the end of June, my family and I moved into our new home. It is an older home with a mature yard and landscaping. We have many perennials, shrubs, bushes, and a lovely garden box. When we moved in, everything was in bloom. I am starting from scratch this spring. My goal is to figure out what kinds of plants and shrubs I have and how to best maintain them. I would like to find out what vegetables are best planted together, what are best for the location of my garden bed and how I should fertilize the soil and so on. We are fortunate to have underground sprinklers, which I have never had before. I would like to investigate best time of day to water and for how long as well as, when is the best time to cut the grass and what length to cut it to.

By the end of this semester, I hope that my thumb is a bit greener and my plants are happy!

Here are the before pictures, taken May 13, 2023.