1.) I plan to watch The Social Dilemma very soon. Based on the preview, it covers the logistics of how tech companies designed these social media platforms to hook us into continually scrolling on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

2.) The I Can Help website looks like it has some great curriculum to help students learn important skills and strategies to manage online negativity, how to report inappropriate behavior, and safe ways to interact with social media. I plan to circle back to this website to learn more about what they offer.

3.) The Common Sense website has free curriculum on teaching a 45 minute lesson on Online Disinhibition and Cyberbullying, which is geared towards high school aged students. I intend to look at this curriculum more carefully to possibly use it to teach my students about these two topics.

1.) Eighteen year olds of today are projected to spend 93% of their free time looking at a screen within their lifetime, a staggering number that helped me realize just how tightly tech companies have their tentacles wrapped around all of us.

2.) Tech companies are incentivized to keep our attention by keeping us staring at our screens, meaning they don't work to facilitate greater connections between actual people, and don't necessarily reflect our values.

3.) Fake news spreads six times faster than truths (from The Social Dilemma) which leads to people being uninformed about what is actually happening in the world around them, would could lead people to make decisions that can hurt them and won't reflect their values.

4.) Social media platforms benefit from people getting outraged by the content that they see, because then users are motivated to keep using the platform and share articles that are frustrating them, which spreads more outrage.

5.) Some platforms, like Snap Chat, incentivize users to use their platform everyday and send messages to particular friends, to keep their Snapstreak going. The message itself doesn't have to have any substance necessarily. Someone can just send a random picture as their message, thereby continuing communication, but not in a meaningful way.

1. Set up scheduled notification summaries on my phone for Facebook, Instagram, and FB Messenger. These are the apps I am drawn to the most during the day. To limit my usage of these apps, I set it up where I will only get notifications twice a day (at 8am and 6pm) for these apps.

2. For the tech challenge I am also going to commit to not using Instagram or Facebook after 8pm each night.

5 days later...

And here's how it went...

1. Setting up notifications to twice a day helped me lessen the frequency with which I looked at Instagram and Facebook during the day. I like having notifications for Facebook and Instagram being delivered to my phone just twice a day so I plan to keep these new notification settings intact on my phone. Not seeing the red notifications during the day led me to check those apps less frequently in the middle of the day.

2. For the second part of my tech challenge I agreed to not use FB or IG after 8pm. I'll admit, there were a few nights where I was very tempted to log into those apps after 8pm, but I kept the commitment and didn't go on those apps after 8pm for 5 days. This challenge made me realize that FB and IG are two apps I need to remain vigilant about not wasting time on. Instead of going on IG and FB after 8pm, what I found myself doing instead was going onto other apps, like YouTube and Netflix. This made me realize that I may need a more comprehensive plan to limit my evening tech use, so my time is not sucked away.