When does your digital footprint start?

  • When you start putting information online in your blog?
  • When you join Facebook or Twitter?
  • When you join Animoto or YouTube?

Check out this video about your digital dossier or footprint and how information can be gathered about you.

Commonsense media has lots of videos about your digital footprint. Check out this one from Abbas.

The following activities are for middle school and high school students rather than primary/elementary grades.

Activity 1: Do you have a different personality when you are online? Think about your avatar, your status updates, music you upload, your images and your blog. Would someone who knows you in real life recognize you online? Check out this slideshow from the NY Times.  Write a post about your personality online. Why do you think some people exaggerate or change their identity when they are online?

Activity 2: What can strangers learn about you online? Could your friend Google your name and find out lots of information about you? Do you have your birthdate, your email address, your home address, your cell phone number somewhere online? Google yourself or maybe your teacher will let you Google them. What do you find out? In your post, don’t give out the private information you found.

Activity 3: Are you on Facebook? Have you checked the privacy help pages? Read through them and write a post about something that surprised you about the settings? Did you change some of your settings after reading the information? Why? Here is another article on Facebook privacy settings.

Teachers:

You might like to read this post by Kathleen Morris (Australia) about teaching students about the digital footprints. She includes resources for all grades.

The following activities are for all  grades.

Activity 4. Write a post about your favourite tool to embed on your blog

Many students mentioned they wanted to know about some more web2.0 tools they could use on their blog. So here is your chance to promote a favourite web2.0 tool. Remember to create a link in your post so your readers can visit the site you are recommending. A new one many students in my class like using is Storybird. Your teacher can create a class account, then when your book has been moderated by your teacher they can embed a story in your blog. Or you can do what Lauren has done and create a post with links to your storybirds.

Activity 5. What is digital citizenship?

Play this game about digital citizenship. How well did you go? Write a post telling your readers about digital citizenship – what you should do rather than what you shouldn’t do. Maybe you would prefer to create a book, poster or video about digital citizenship. Some web2.0 tools you might use with parental or teacher permission glogster, goanimate, audioboo or flipbook.

Activity relating to number 10

What 10 educational games or iPad apps should all students be able to use at school? Give reason why it is considered educational.

Activity relating to blogging

One way to find information easily on the internet is using tags. Photos, geocaches, maps and posts are all tagged in some way. For example this post has been tagged by me with ‘digital footprint’ and ‘Facebook’. This means when I want to write a post again about a digital footprint in the next blogging challenge, I can just click on the tag and up will come all my posts about footprints.

On your blog, you need to start using tags and/or categories. Here are some examples:

  • Category: Book Reviews   Tags: names of authors, genres, name of book
  • Category: Special events  Tags: athletic carnival, birthday, Earth Hour, Dr Seuss birthday
  • Category: Holidays  Tags: Easter, Spring Break, ANZAC Day, Martin Luther King Day
  • Category: Student posts  Tags: name of each student

If using Edublogs, you create post categories under your dashboard>posts>categories

If using Edublogs, tags are created the same place but dashboard>posts>tags

You can add categories and tags on the main page when you are writing your post. These are usually found on the right side under the big blue publish button.

If you have already written a post and haven’t included categories/tags, then go to dashboard>posts>all posts  Under the post find the quick edit and click on that. You now have options to add categories and tags without opening the whole post.

Visiting other blogs

I hope classes and students are visiting lots of other blogs and leaving great comments. I have seen some fantastic conversations happening. Remember to add the student name and blog URL to your dashboard>links if you want to visit that person often.

91 thoughts on “Challenge 6 – Digital footprints

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  8. Hi Miss W.
    I really enjoy the posts and challenges every week. I think that it really involves bloggers who are either just starting up or want to get back into blogging!
    Thanks for making the challenges interesting.
    Jess, proudly bookworm.

  9. Thank you for continuing to write great challenges each week. We are blogging much more often and really enjoying our experience in the Edublogs challenge.

    We’ve even found ourselves a BBB (Best Blogging Buddy). Climb High from Canada has visited our blog often. We are so excited about connecting with them on a regular basis.

    From,
    Mrs. McKelvey

  10. Hello Miss W ,
    me and my classmates were wondering if this challenge includes writing posts about all the activities or choose one and work on it! 🙂

    1. G’day Arwa,
      Every week there have been lots of activities to choose from, but most students have done the one relating to number 10 because that was at the beginning of the post. You can choose to work on one activity only or try more than one. Perhaps you could do some later in the year when the challenge is not running.

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