TT 5: Digital Footprints

Digital footprints are a hot topic in the education world these days, and mostly for the negative. You don't often here about the positives teachers do online, unfortunately it is usually the negative. Luckily my digital footprint is pretty clean. When you Google me the things that pop up are my professional portfolio on weebly, and my twitter account. I think it is important to have some sort of footprint, however I think it is very easy for it to become a negative quickly, which is why you need to protect it. You can protect it by making your Facebook and twitter accounts private,same with your instagram, delete old accounts for sites you don't use anymore. At the end of the day though, the easiest way to protect your footprint, is think before you post. Once you post something on the internet it is out there forever and you have no idea who may see it. So be smart about what your sharing.

When it comes to my digital identity, I would say I am for the most part the same on and offline. I find the same things funny, or gross, or sad that I would on and off. But the area where I would say I am different is when it comes to sharing. Offline I will talk to people about just about anything, as long as I know the people I am comfortable sharing, but online I try to be more selective with what I post. For the simple reason that if I shared everything I did offline for one I would spend way too much time posting, and two I guarantee I would share something stupid that could backfire on me. Online if you make a joke or maybe you are sarcastic, it is much hard to convey that then it is offline. So you may be having fun, but somebody can take what you say and get a completely different message than what you were actually trying to say. So this is one reason why I try and be more selective.

This leads to the last point I want to make on the digital footprint topic. We NEED to teach students the importance of being smart online. We need to teach them the importance of making wise choices when it comes to posting and sharing, and that what you do post can have consequences on your future. One way to try and do this in the future would be something simple, like showing students articles of how peoples digital footprints have hurt them or just have them Google themselves and see what shows up. For a few other tips on teaching digital footprints I found this article , which has some good ideas.