Would You Hire You?

As part of our roll-out of a revamped Digital Citizenship Agreement (formerly Acceptable Use Policy), we had the opportunity in an advisory class session to engage our Upper School students in thinking about their online identity - their personal brand.  @bobthebrarian and I created a lesson, Would You hire You?, designed to have students evaluate their digital footprints and reflect on how they are portraying themselves to university admissions officers and potential employers.

Lesson Materials

Presentation (with teacher notes included)

Teacher Notes for Presentation in PDF

Handout PDF

Reflection

I was fortunate to substitute for a regular advisor at the last minute.  My group of 12 students was mostly engaged for the entire lesson and gave me some good insight in our debrief at the end. We had a good discussion, although I wished I would have come up with debrief questions prior to "on the spot."  While a majority of the students rated themselves to have mainly positive digital footprints, it was also good to hear how many of them had a good grasp of privacy settings and other strategies.  In fact, every hand went up when I asked "who has ever asked a friend to remove a photo or other content from a social network?".  You can look at that as 1) there are photos out there of all the students behaving badly, or that 2) all students know the appropriate steps to advocate for themselves and attempt to remove potentially damaging photos - I'm choosing the second view.