Mia's Galleria

To start unit 4, we discussed video game usage in the classroom. My experience with them is quite limited. The only game I have consistently enjoyed over a long period of time is Minecraft, and my interest in that only comes in intermittent spurts. I also had an Animal Crossing problem for about a month, but my addiction to it got so bad so fast that I would neglect myself and my needs in favor of catching digital fish. Needless to say, that had to stop. While video games are not exactly my thing, I have used them in an educational context. In my high school German class, we made videos for our end of unit projects, and I did the majority of mine in Minecraft. Our units were mostly about everyday topics, like parts of a house, colors, animals, hobbies, foods, and jobs. In Minecraft I was able to show these things through my character’s outfits, items in the game, and through sets I would build. In our reading, “Video Games in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom,” by Brady L.

We started unit 3 with a reading and discussion on social media use. The article, “Middle School Students’ Social Media Use,” showed that while social media has its deficits, it is a booming highway of communication that uses multiple modes to convey information. When I tracked my own social media usage, I was not incredibly surprised. TikTok consumes a large majority of my screen time, which I expected, but the disparity between my usage of it and all other apps is quite large. In the past week, I spent 21.5 hours on TikTok with the closest second being Snapchat with 5.5 hours. This averages out to about 3 hours a day for TikTok and 47 minutes a day on Snapchat. I’m honestly surprised that Snapchat was the second highest. I only open it up to send or receive a quick picture or message, so I thought it would be lower. Etsy, Depop, and Pinterest are where I fall down most of my rabbit holes, so I was surprised that none of them were even in my top five. TikTok is my biggest time waster