First, I just wanted to say that this week’s lecture was extremely helpful and insightful. Jesse Miller’s extensive knowledge and passion for this topic was very inspiring. It has given me a bit of a reality check to make sure that I have all my social media accounts in order. Now, I have always had private accounts just for my own personal reasons, but a few years back some of my teacher friends suggested to not have my last name in any accounts. They mentioned that this caused even more of a privacy barrier between them and their students.

I think we can help our learners manage their digital footprints by discussing what this consists of at an early age. Highlighting the importance of a digital footprint and how this sticks with you is especially important for the older grades. Some tips we can encourage our learners to participate in are: use privacy settings on social media accounts, not to overshare on social media, regularly google yourself, make sure to read the terms and conditions (or at least skim through main parts), understand that publishing is public sharing, and once posting it can stay there forever.

When googling myself, there was nothing too surprising, as I like to do so regularly and make sure that there are no pictures of me that I wouldn’t want my job or future school and colleagues to see. I did think it was odd that there were pictures of celebrities I follow under images of me. For example, there is a fashion influencer I follow and handful of her instagram photos are under google images of me. Another thing I found surprising was an article from seven years ago that I made a brief comment in still showed up in my google feed.

I will definitely be changing my use of social media after Jesse Miller’s discussion as I was not aware of a lot of the points he brought up. For example, when Jesse mentioned how a teacher was using Snapchat and posting “grade one again..” I had no idea that admin and the school district could see what you were posting on your private accounts! This definitely made me double check my future use of social media on the job. I will of course have all my accounts turned to private and will not be posting anything I wouldn’t want my students or school board to see.

I found these two YouTube videos that helped with managing one’s digital footprint that went into greater detail:

https://www.netnanny.com/blog/what-every-teen-needs-to-know-about-their-digital-footprint/#:~:text=The%20digital%20footprint%20that%20is,they’ve%20been%20up%20to

In addition, I found this article/blog that explains in an easy and low stress way the impact your digital footprint can have on you. After reading and reflecting on this article I found that introducing some of these main points would be an excellent way to discuss with my future students. “In other words: It’s what’s left behind as you casually browse the web, post on social media or even type into a chat service. Whether or not you’re aware, you contribute to your digital footprint or profile each day when you log onto the Internet. The websites you visit, the news posts you comment on, the comments you leave on social media platforms— each of these items come together to create a portrait of your online life.” I found this to be extremely true, as you see that past social media posts can be resurfaced in current celebrities and influencers lives. We have seen that past posts that were made can be easily found, and many people have experienced the “cancel culture” and losing their jobs because of this. Emphasizing the fact that social media posts don’t disappear and that it can affect your future career and family, will hopefully let students know that keeping your digital footprint clean is important.