Digital footprint is essentially what you are leaving behind on the internet. Pretty much everything you do online is being tracked and used whether you want it be or not. I googled my name to see what would pop up and nothing showed up that surprised me. I am pretty quiet when it comes to social media, so basically nothing showed up when I googled my name. My twitter account popped up, but that is private so people who don't follow me can't access my tweets. If you look at images there are no images on google (thankfully). Overall my digital footprint for the general public is very small and I am happy about this. Your digital footprint is very important. If you have a negative online footprint it can really come back to bite you. Potential employers are most likely going to do a quick google search of you and if something bad pops up it could affect if you get the job or not. It is important for us as teachers to teach our students about this and let them know how connected the online world and offline world are. In my opinion they aren't separate at all. This is something that we need to teach our students. We have to teach our students that we have to be smart about what we post online and we should protect our social media accounts. In my opinion your social media accounts should be semi private. My personal twitter account is private because I don't want students that I am teaching following me. Even though I rarely tweet and when I do it isn't bad things, but I cannot control what people tweet about me or what I am mentioned in.
Overall I am glad that when I was is High School social media wasn't that popular yet. Facebook was starting to get big, but I never used it. I think students nowadays document their entire lives on their social media for the world to see and I think they need to be careful about doing this and we need to educate them about some of the things that could happen to them by doing this.
I really like your post on this Brook. I agree with you that nowadays employers will be on the look out for future employees on the internet especially through social media sites. Prior to education I deleted my facebook and twitter almost a full year before ed to make sure everything connected to me was gone. I am hard to find on internet for social media because I do not reveal my name and everything is hid under a different name so students cannot find me. So when I google myself, my baseball performances, stats and auction stuff is the only things that come up because I really never posted pictures of myself either. Yay for social media and it not being a huge thing when we were in school.
ReplyDeleteI agree with kelly, we as educators need to be professional on our online plat forms and be aware on what we post. I also think the digital footprint can be a great marketing tool when it comes to applying for jobs.
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