Miss. Bueckert's Digital Identity and Footprint and a look at resources on Digital Identity

“Tweet others the way you want to want to be tweeted.”― Germany Kent

This blog post looks at my own digital identity and footprint along with some reflection about why my digital footprint is the way it is. Secondly, I will look at how to introduce the topic of digital identity into my own classroom. I will end this blog post by sharing several YouTube videos that I would consider using in my elementary classroom.

For this tech task, we were asked to google ourselves and see what the search engine has to say about me. Prior to taking part in this tech task, I hypothesized that I would not find much on myself and I will explain why. I have Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, and Blogger accounts. I have put the privacy settings up as much as I can so that people can only see my profile picture on my Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts. On Snapchat, I have my 'bitmoji' available for view but my account is private and my location services are off. I have left my twitter and blogger accounts public for the purposes of this course however I just started them within the past few weeks so no. I cannot recall ever being in my local paper except being listed as a family member in an obituary. With this in the back of my mind, I jumped in to see whether my hypothesis would be revealed to be true or not.

I started with a simple google search in the all section. The first five links were for social media platforms linked to an Alicia Bueckert. I clicked each one to see what I would find. The first was for an Instagram user who is from here and Manitoba and has some mutual followers to me. The second one gave me a list for Facebook accounts associated with my name. I clicked it and my account was the top of the list. The third link brought me to another Facebook user with the same name as me. The fourth link led to a Pinterest with my name attached, but again, it wasn't me. After that, there are other links without my name on them, but again, not me. Next, I clicked on the images tab to see if I could find any images associated with me. I found one picture of me taking part with an on campus event and there is a picture of my grandma who passed away when I was in grade 12. Otherwise, the rest of the images are not of me. Thirdly and fourthly, I clicked on the news and video tab, I didn't find any information about me on there. It turns out that my hypothesis about my digital was correct. I wasn't able to find much information about myself.

I believe that the main reason why you can't find as much about myself on the internet is because of the privacy settings I have in place. Additionally, I have not been in the news very often since I never played sports or took part in well-known activities. Growing up, I spent most of my time at home. We only had dial up internet growing up so I didn't use it very much. My family got high speed when I was in grade 12 and that's when I started to set up my social media accounts. Additionally, I haven't put much effort into getting my name out there for people to see. Growing up, I tended to keep to myself.

As a teacher, I believe that it is important to start discussing two topics with your students prior to talking about digital identity. First, you need to discuss with your students about being good digital citizens. You will find a YouTube videos at the end of this blog post that you could show your elementary school students surrounding digital citizenship. Kids need to know that their behavior online is important. I see many adults being rude to each other on Facebook simply because they choose to ignore the fact that they are talking to real people. I want to help raise students who are respectful of other people's ideas and opinions. Secondly, I think that it is important to teach students about the idea of online privacy. Students need to understand that when they make a profile online, post a picture of snap chat, or upload a video to Tik Tok, that it is on the web and depending on their privacy settings, they could be viewed all over the world by hundreds of thousands of people. This is important to teach the students because they need to understand the importance of being careful of what they post. This will help give students more background knowledge and understanding of what happens online and set up your discussion around digital footprints.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this blog post!

Online Privacy for Kids