My Digital Footprint💻💡
For my week two reflection I chose to go on the adventure of discovering my digital footprint. Upon googling myself I found nothing interesting except one selfie of me from middle school. However, I have seen first hand how a digit footprint can hurt your career as a teacher.
While I was in school there was a first year teacher. I will not tell the full story but there was a photo she had posted that would have been innocent in any other career, but unfortunately a few students found the photo. The students printed it off at the school library and shared it around the halls. The school investigated and the students were held accountable. However, the situation will not be forgotten.
Sergey Zolkin | Unsplash
The White Hatter⚪️📱
I believe it’s important to not only be careful of our digital footprints but also sharing online safety with our students. There are plenty of resources to help teachers navigate those tricky conversations with students. Such as, how everything posted is there forever, how there can be legal implications to online bullying and harassment and much more.
The White Hatter is a company that does workshops and presentations about online safety, online bully and online harassment. It is a great team of people doing amazing work that teachers and schools can rely on to have accurate information.
I had the opportunity to attend a workshop in high school and it was a truly amazing experience. one takeaway was their ability to get across the importance of online safety.
The photo below has an attached like to the White Hatter site. The link below is to a preview video about digital literacy created by the White Hatter.
So what?🧐
This type of education is extremely important to students because outside of the classroom we cannot control what students access, how ever we can teach our students how to be safe online and give them resources to access. I learned through this research that unfortunately there are many scary things that can happen online and it stays online forever. I believe it is necessary to teach digital literacy and safety to everyone even teachers and will make it a personal goal to discuss online safety with my students, peers and fellow teachers.
