Digital Citizenship
This week’s class topic was on digital citizenship, so for my blog post I decided to take a deep dive into my digital footprint. When I did a google search of my name I found all the things I expected – social media, news articles that included my name, and stats and posts from my time in Kamloops playing basketball.
The first page to show up upon my googling was the TRU women’s basketball player profile. This was very interesting as it contained many highlighted photos of my time playing basketball, which was very fun to flip through. There was then the U Sport player profile on me containing all of my U Sport career. This was not as fun to flip through as the stats weren’t great to look at, especially all of the team losses. There were also many other basketball related articles – including my recruitment announcement, tags of me from certain games, as well as articles from me playing in high school. These results are something that I am proud to be a part of my digital footprint, as this is a time of my life with a lot of different emotions, but it will be a good memory to look back on. When I was playing basketball I searched through the U Sport archives frequently, and found my Aunt’s statistics from her time playing. I compared our stats which allowed me to feel a sense of pride seeing that I was playing at the same level as one of my idols. I hope that one day children close to me (friends, family, kids I coached, maybe even one day my own kids) go down the same path and can look back on these results, just as I did and feel the same sense of pride.
In my search of myself I also found articles related to The Cranbrook Professional Rodeo. I am a board member of the Wycliffe Exhibition Association, so found articles from interviews I have done about the rodeo. I think the favourite thing I found throughout my dive into my digital footprint is an article from the Canadian Professional Rodeo Hall of Fame, which was my Grandmothers induction announcement. I loved reading this, and all the memories that it brought up.
The final search results that actually pertained to me was my social media pages – Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and linked in. As expected, all of these sites were private, or contained very little information. My linked in account just had my schooling information. My Pinterest only contained some recipes, teaching ideas, and horse related pins. The other three sites were private with very little to show from just a google search, but I took it a step further to login to my accounts to ensure everything on them was appropriate and something I would be proud of if a student or boss happened to have full access to it. Of course, it was, but this is something that educators must be very aware of, as teachers are naturally held to a higher standard.