Google+

Technology keeps moving on and evolving whether or not you're on board with it, and that's not good for a junior high teacher.  It means that my kids are more computer savvy than I am because I'm too busy planning lessons about prepositions while they're at home surfing the net.

Lately I've gotten a couple of Google+ e-mail invitations from students, but I'm not on Google+. I found this rather confusing.  I pulled the principal's kid aside after school (he's pretty fab; he's in one of my lit classes), and I asked him what's up with this.  He got onto Google+ and showed me his account.  If someone is in your "circle," you can see everything they post (links, pictures, statuses, etc.).  You can "like" things and comment on them...  does this sound familiar?  Yes.  It's sneaky facebook for kids who can't have facebook.  So basically all of my junior high kids are this Google+ thingy and have made their own covert-ops secret social network.

I asked principal-kid to show me what kids can see when they search me.  I've never accepted any of them into my circles (which I never even set up).  So he google-stalked me on this Google+ account that I have literally never been on...and it was the FREAKIEST THING EVER!

Google+ came up with a bunch of pictures of me from Facebook.  Creepy!  It also came up with a link to my YouTube channel (which has a bunch of videos from my cross-country road trips).  They aren't bad videos per-se, but also not super professional types that I would want to share with all of my kids.  There was also a link to my YOUTUBE HISTORY, which shows all of the videos I've viewed on YouTube.  WHAT?!?!?!  I mean, when you click on it you see that I've spent the last two weeks watching nothing but a lot of expositions on Puritan literature, but still.  It's the principle of the thing.  There were also links to both of my blogs (HEY KID!  GET OFF MY BLOG!  GO DO YOUR HOMEWORK!).   Creepy, creepier, creepiest.

I basically freaked out and spent the next half hour trying to block all of my Google+ stuff.  I almost deleted my entire gmail account by accident, but luckily I realized what I was doing before I hit the final "confirm" button.  Still,  it's so weird that my kids had access to all of that stuff without me knowing about it.  I don't think any of them really stalked me that extensively (I hope), but the fact that they could have is eerie.  It's also ironic that their parents are so anti-facebook, but the kids are essentially doing the same thing through a different technological vehicle.  Those sneaky little buggers.  Watch out for kids and technology - they're quickly outsmarting us.  And when a bunch of pre-teens end up taking over the world, that's going to be a scary place to live.