Our Students' Digital Footprints

As we prepare to go fully 1:1 next school year in our district, there is a lot of work to be done and logistics to hammer out.  The possibilities for change in our classrooms, our buildings, our students' homes, and our community are exciting.  While this won't happen overnight, the end results seem limitless.  One of the many things I've been thinking about is the concept of student digital footprints.  For many of our faculty and staff, myself included, we've only recently begun to leave our footprints on the World Wide Web.  Some of the items are professional while others are personal, but together they can tell a story about each of us.  Our students and our own children are growing up in a time when their entire lives may be, in one form or another, documented online.  The ramifications of this could be extremely positive for them but also potentially very negative.  The simple example of an employer "Googling" a potential new hire's name is just one of many scenarios where a digital footprint could come into play.  I'll be thinking about this topic a lot more in the upcoming semester and how it relates to what we do in education and how we do it.  If you're interested in this topic, I encourage you to watch the following TEDx talk by author Steve Johnson.  Please also consider leaving a comment with your thoughts or links to resources that I and others reading this post may benefit from.