Digital Citizenship

Hello all,

This time we are looking at digital citizenship. Digital citizenship is your identity as it stands on the internet. It can be thought of as what comes up when someone Googles you. For example, my digital citizenship is affected by this blog, and my Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts. Whenever I make a profile that includes personal information, that information is forever put onto the internet for people to see. Sounds pretty scary, right? Sadly, for younger generations, many times their digital citizenship is created before they are even born. How many pregnancy, gender, and baby name reveals have you seen in the past year on your social media accounts? Each one of those put out information of a (soon to be) person. Shortly following those posts, we see the baby pictures, first birthday videos, and numerous posts about the child before they can even talk. I know I'm painting a pretty bleak picture on technology and digital citizenship, but that is only to stress the importance of it and the importance of safeguarding ourselves from exposing too much. I feel that the PSA "Think Before You Post" stressed the point well enough.

Facebook and other social media networks have the option of putting your phone number and address on your profile, which you can then decide for that information to be public or private. For a teenager that is a frightening thought. But what about the entrepreneur? For them, the accessibility and publicity are tools that are crucial to the growth of their business. For the aspiring actor, their YouTube videos being seen by millions of people can lead to them achieving their dream of going to Hollywood.

For me, my digital citizenship has been forming since middle school. Only now am I seeing the worth of it as a tool to build relationships to help further my career. Ever since I started my career in teaching, I have been developing a PLN using social media. That PLN has given me many resources to consider. Some are teaching methods use in my classroom, others are articles that challenge my views and serve to make me a better individual.

To sum up my thoughts on digital citizenship, I'll say that it is here to stay and we must understand it in order to both use it to its fullest potential, and to protect ourselves from its possible dangers.

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