A+ Education Issues Blog

  Hi everyone! This week’s post will cover social media and cell phone use, as well as the issues caused by changing technology in schools. Last week’s post was supposed to be about drugs and how they affect students and districts. My post was on screen time because screens and phones are just as addicting as drugs. The first few minutes of the documentary “Plugged-in: The True Toxicity of Social Media Revealed” describes how social media connects with your brain using the “dopamine reward system”. Dopamine is a feel good neurotransmitter, it plays a large role in addictions. When someone does cocaine they get a “fast increase of dopamine in their brain”(Cristol, H.). The same thing happens when people use social media. People start to crave the dopamine which inturn makes them do the action that supplies it, this is the dopamine reward system.  Personally, the only good thing that all of the new technology has brought for me is that I no longer have to rely on teachers/profes...

                           This week I exclaimed a lesson plan on the effects of too much screen time. Excessive screen time can cause trouble sleeping, mood changes, and alterations to your brain. The lesson plan is best for grades 6-12, although there is a version adapted to a 4th grade reading level. It starts with a reading vocabulary list, followed by a reading comprehension activity, finished by a data collection and analysis activity. As a math teacher I would alter this lesson to focus more on data collecting and analysis. Students would still complete the reading, in order to learn the dangers of too much screen time. Then using the data collected from the students the class would find their individual average time spent looking at a screen a day, then using those answers find the average for the class. This lesson could be made into a lesson on the measures of central tendency (mean, median, and mo...

               Hey everyone! This week’s post will cover mindfulness and the importance of introducing it in schools. After watching the video Room to Breathe the impact that mindfulness can have on students becomes evident. The four students the video focuses on, Omar, Lesly, Jacqueline, and Gerardo, all had extremely positive experiences due to the implantation of a mindfulness program. The group were all in danger of being held back due to their grades and behavior, however due to the tools mindfulness gave them were able to make positive changes in their lives. “Their disciplinary referrals all declined dramatically” and “their teachers, parents, and the kids themselves felt that they had more control over their actions” (2012, Room to Breathe). The students were all hesitant at first to the concepts of mindfulness but overtime learned to have an open mind about it and saw the benefits. I myself was less than siked when I saw that part of...