week 8 reflection
How can we help our learners manage their digital footprints?
Internet safety is a difficult subject to introduce to kids for a variety of reasons, we want to teach them how house the internet safety but if we approach the dangerous sides of the internet wrong students might turn to fearing the internet as a whole… blah dee blah we want them to lean how to use this amazing educational tool safety. I think its important to introduce he concept of digital footprint young – before its too late (kinda like how you start sex ed before kids are having sex) but this concept can be complex for young students so I would start by introducing it through picture books.
Nerdy Bird Tweets by Aaron Reynolds
I feel a bit hippocritital while sitting here talking about how important your digital footprint is meanwhile I have been online for over halfmylife and have never taken it super seriously. I’ve always known not to post anything I incriminating or inappropriate and I have always kept my social media PG as I have a collection of old dance students and their moms, my grandparents, old coaches and even my parents friends following my accounts but I feel like my younger self still didn’t fully grasp how my digital footprint could effect my life in ways of getting jobs, especially in a career path like education. I will say that when I googled myself the only things that were to come up were old newspaper articles about my dance career, my grad photos, and some volunteering stuff from when I was in an active part of my high school fundraising and leadership team. Even though my instagram was openly public and my username being simply @danicaedwards I was very shocked that my instagram didn’t come up on google, although my Facebook account did – even though I don’t actively use Facebook.
Since Jesse’s guest lecture I have already changed my instagram account to private. I have had two instagram accounts since 2016 with one as my main account where I have people from all aspects of my life connected and it is how I keep many of my connections updated on a large scale (the one I talked about above) and then I also have had one with about 50 followers and it is all of my dearest, closest friends. I use this account almost as a store my memories from throughout the years without caring if I looked particularly good or directly related to aspects of my life only the people I see daily would know and this account has always been private with no attachment to me because I used fun usernames and the profile picture is never a plain selfie like my first account. For the last 2 years I have used my main public account almost as a blog… anyone could see it and read what I was up to and I obviously owned the page, but during Jesse’s talk he talked about his view of social media presence I realized that I would be more comfortable if I turned my public account back to private. I also got my practicum placement at a middle school and after visiting them one afternoon, I decided it would be very easy for my grade 7 students to find me online.
As I mentioned earlier, I have been on social media for over half my life. I looked back at the date I created my instagram account on March 21st, 2013 which means we are about a week away from my 10 year anniversary on instagram – which is terrifying. I was learning how to navigate the dangers of social media before I knew what decimal numbers were. I’m not even 20 years old yet which means I have spent the majority of my developmental years with a social media presence and I think me being introduced to it so early had a big effect on me not taking internet safety seriously.
