My Digital Footprint

A digital footprint is the trail you leave everytime you use the internet. No matter you do on the internet, there is some sort of mark you left behind. Digital footprints can cause a huge controversy for educators and others that work in a school. Yesterday, I read multiple articles on teachers and social media and the consequences they have had to face because of certain images they have uploaded to their different social media accounts.

My Digital Footprint

I have wanted to become a teacher for as long as I can remember and because of that, I have also been self-cautious of what I have posted on my social media accounts. From being cautious from the beginning of my social media accounts, I believe that my digital footprint is fairly good. I have recently gone through all of my social media accounts and ensured that all of my posts are appropriate and all of my accounts are private. My posts on my social media are appropriate that students and parents could see them, however, I do not think I would choose to invite them to browse my personal accounts because I would like to keep my professional and personal life separate.

How Can I Improve my Digital Footprint?

Although my digital footprint is appropriate, I do believe that there are many ways I could improve my digital footprint from an educators perspectives. I think that by adding more professional content on ‘top’ of my digital footprint would improve it because a majority of my footprint is related to high school achievements and sports. These are not necessarily bad aspects, but eventually, when I will be looking for a job, those are not the kinds of things a Superintendent is going to look for. So by the creation of this blog, my educational twitter and Pinterest pages, will help to create new professional accounts and aspects of my digital footprint that will interest my future employers.  These professional social media accounts will help me as a future educator because it will show the Superintendents that I have been professionally active since the beginning of my education and show that I am passionate about my career. It will allow them to read about my thoughts on education practices and to see aspects I find important to education. Having these accounts to show a Superintendent in the future could help me to secure a job, by telling them about me and my educational beliefs.

Take a look at my Twitter page and my Pinterest page to see how I am using them to improve my digital footprint!

 

Information Race & Digital Citizenship

The internet can be a scary place, there is a lot of information and people out there. This is exactly why digital citizenship is such an important thing to learn about as a child and a student. Digital citizenship is the idea that you understand how to use the internet properly and safely. I have recently been learning and discussing this topic and I would like to share how I came about the importance of digital citizenship.

Information Race

I competed in an information race recently, this is where you try and find specific information in the shortest amount of time. During this search, I realized how many fake websites and the amount of inaccurate information there is out there on the internet. Throughout this race, I came across 3 websites, in under 5 minutes.

By experiencing this, I had a major realization of how scary the internet actually is and how digital citizenship can really protect children and people new to the internet. I believed that I had a reasonably strong digital citizenship because I have had access to the internet and surfing the internet since I was quite young, but during this information race I was so concerned with the race aspect, I was not considering my digital safety.  As a pre-service teacher, I believe that children need to learn about digital citizenship in order to find safe and reliable information, whether it be for school or in their personal life. The internet has a ton of information on it, not all be safe or correct, yet so many people do not realize how important digital citizenship is.

How Does One Learn Digital Citizenship 

I believe that digital citizenship should be a required topic in education for students who are going to begin to use the internet in school, let alone in their daily lives because of the many aspects that can be found on the internet. I think that by incorporating digital citizenship into education will decrease the number of children that are not able to learn about it. This will ensure that everyone has the opportunity to learn how to use the internet safely and not leaving it to chance that the parents will teach them this in their home lives.