Another thing that gave me the literacy skills that I have today is instant messaging. My personal favorite is AIM. This instant messaging phase went hand in hand with Myspace. Aim was a place where you could talk to people you didn't normally talk to in person or update your friends instantly without waiting for them to reply over text. I know that AIM was one the first outlet for students to express how they want people to see them.

AIM is also a place for some not so great things like bullying. AIM stands for AOL Instant Messenger. Social networking is still a place where a lot of bullying goes on because the children using these sites do not have to face the student they are bullying, which makes the bullying more likely to happen. When bullying comes up in situations like this, a social (out of school) atmosphere that the students choose to partake in, it is much more difficult to do a lot about cyber bullying as an educator. The article that we were given to read in class talks about students that have low self-esteem tend to be the students that bully.

Encouraging students to be themselves and establishing self worth. would be a tactic to avoid or lessen cyber bullies but it is important to encourage students to stand up for other students and watch out for students being bullied. AIM was also used to express your opinion to other and have deep conversations that you may not have the guts to talk about to someone’s face. This can fall under Halliday's model of instructing language. When you would get on AIM you are learning through language. You are reading what the other person says and coming up with your responses to what they say. Having a conversation is the best way to learn through language and the fact that AIM is over written language is perfect. It established my use of critical thinking and I was able to go back to all of the text that I wrote and evaluate what I said. Casual written text is common now but when AIM became popular texting hadn't evolved yet.

If you look in my portfolio you will find some of the songs and artists that I listened to. Some are average pre-teen songs and others are songs that my older brothers influenced me to listen to.