I am sure many of you have, like me, watched with dismay as President Trump and Kym Jong-un tweeted about the size of their nuclear buttons at the beginning of January.

It is an almost absurd way to govern but, perhaps the simplicity demanded by the 140-character limit has played its part in the erosion of nuance from today’s political debate.

Social media has been around for a good while now and it has impacted on school life for good and for bad.

But in the past 12 to 18 months there has been a huge increase in the intensity of teenage obsession with social media verging on almost addiction.

Indeed, some fundamental aspects of being a community and communicating with other human beings are in danger of being eroding by stealth.

Just look at the number of people on their phones when you next go to a restaurant or even the cinema!

The current generation of phones provides instant access to more information than the biggest library could store and the ability to be in touch with anyone across the world in an instant.

This explosion of technology has come about so quickly that as a society we have had little time, if any, to reflect on whether we want it.

So how do schools handle these issues?

Well, it seems at times that whatever we do we come in for criticism. I know of schools that have banned them entirely while others have tried to embrace them.

We allow pupils to bring them to school, but we also try to teach them to use them responsibly and for the most part, this approach appears to work.

Indeed, we are using them cautiously as aids to learning in some lessons and we are tentatively trying out different apps to see which may actually be an educational benefit.

There is no doubt that this approach appears to result in most pupils learning how to use technology positively, but I have little doubt that some will chose not to and when this happens it will be met with fair and proportionate measures.

But, our concern as educators and parents should be that this learning process can involve a lot of mistakes some of which may be seriously damaging to children.

Whether it is loss of sleep; an addictive need to check the ‘likes’ on Instagram or Facebook; an easy means to court cheap peer popularity through being unkind to another pupil; whether it is a means of sharing of inappropriate images; viewing distressing propaganda from war zones; or whether it is the destructive obsession of contrasting one’s own online persona with the often digitally enhanced images of everyone else’s.

This is clearly a punishing world and children appear to be particularly vulnerable.

The challenge I feel, for schools and parents, is teaching the children the difference between using technology and being used by it!