The “digital footprint” or, as others call it – “digital tattoo”, is something that I’ve been aware of for some time. It really started becoming apparent when I was enrolled in my Bachelor of Education program at UBC: there was a presentation at least once a semester with a tone of fear behind it. Each session contained warnings of students who were denied teaching certificates or educators fired from jobs for seemingly minor things they had posted online. One such example was a student from New York who was denied the awarding of her teaching certificate from her university for a photo on her MySpace. She was holding a red Solo cup with the word “Pirate” etched onto it (one of those write-on cups), and was wearing a pirate hat folded out of regular white paper. You couldn’t even see the contents of the cup! To this day I wonder if that story was made up to incite fear into our social media use. I guess I could Google it and probably find out, but I haven’t.
As I entered teaching, I was less cautious than my UBC colleagues but I did take precautions to lock down Facebook and other media. Some of my friends went as far as deleting and/or “hiding” the entirety of their photos from public view – even from their friend connections online. Later, when I joined Twitter, I held the attitude that the media had to host only professional content, and nothing personal. Over time, I realized that forging professional relationships has a personal element, and I began to share a little bit more about my life. It also helped that I found my fiancé through that very network; my personal life got to be pretty known to those people I was trying so hard to hide it from in the first place! Now, I share some of my Instagram photography openly, posting it to my Twitter account selectively, but I still keep my Facebook pretty locked up, even though I have many professional contacts there, too. Most of my photos are of travel, hikes, natural beauty, or family, but my fiancé and I are craft beer enthusiasts, so that gets snuck in every once in awhile.
When considering students, we constantly have conversations about digital citizenship and the impact of what they post online. I’ll reiterate here what Keri stated in her post – it isn’t a single unit of study, it needs to be an ongoing conversation. Personally, I use snippets from Common Sense Media’s Scope & Sequence (2016) as well as Media Smarts (2016) to inform my digital citizenship curriculum. As I shared in my post last week, I use a lot of social media and blogging in my classroom, and teach digital citizenship through actual use of the media. For example, lessons such as Paper Blogging provide great scaffolding for online conversations through commentary.
Even though my students are really young, I start working with them on image copyright and appropriate citations. Since asking them to format citations in APA is a bit much, I often ask them to provide a website list to me (they also learn keyboard shortcuts REALLY fast this way!). Additionally, I show them how to cite images and what kinds of images they can actually legally use. We use physical theft as an analogy to using copyrighted images or plagiarizing websites online. This is a very difficult concept for them, and we’re not perfect at it by any means. If I had to improve in one area, it would be this one – even though my students are only 8 and 9.
References
Common Sense Media. (2016). Scope & Sequence: Common Sense K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum. Retrieved from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/scope-and-sequence
Media Smarts. (2016). Digital & Media Literacy. Retrieved from http://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy