Week 3

The topic this week was Digital Citizenship. We started off by talking about digital footprints, how you look and present yourself online and how you can use 'Personal Branding' to make your self look a particular way online. We were told that if you wanted to present yourself well online then you should appear in the first 3 spots of Google when you search your name. I tried to find myself and found that only my old unused Myspace profile was the only thing from me on the whole first page of Google. This really surprised me as I have not touched that account in years, yet it appears on the first page, however none of my other profiles which I use on a daily basis show up. I also tried searching the title of my webpage and my blog and I have not been able to discover them through a Google search. From a privacy point of view this is a good thing, however in the case that I wanted to be found for self promotional reasons this would be a bad thing and I would have to try and make myself more discoverable.  

Jan said that to make ourselves known and in order to prevent misrepresentation of our selves we should buy domain names, every possible combination. I thought this was a little unnecessary and over the top, even if you are someone who is in the public view often. Even so I still went and had a look at the website that was given to us to check the availability of my name on social media profiles - http://namechk.com/ we were shown many other ways of making ourselves known as well such as About.me and a few different blogging sites.

From there we started to talk about online safety. We were shown a website we could go to for information about how to stay safe online - StaySmartOnline.gov.au, as this is a Government website it probably has quite a bit of useful information, however I have not had a thorough look at it as of yet. We were given advice such as making any profiles private and to update security settings, and to never put personal information on to the Internet.

After we discussed safety, we moved onto cyberbullying, what it looks like and how you might be able to recognise it in another person/student. We were given a list of ways that might help to recognise if someone is being cyber-bullied:

•  changes in personality
•  appearing more lonely or distressed
•  less interaction with students at school
•  possible peer rejection
•  decline in school work
•  excessive sleepiness or lack of focus
•  higher levels of absenteeism
•  increased negative self-perception
•  a decline in physical health
•  suicidal thoughts—this should be reported to administration and parents/carers immediately

Not only was how to identify cyber bullying discussed, but also the reasons behind it. In this section what really surprised me was what is known as self-cyberbullying, where messages and cruel remarks are sent to the person by themselves. The reason for this could vary from seeking attention to trying to get help without having the actually ask. Even so the fact that this happens really shocked me and it was something I never thought I would see, however as a future teacher it will just be one more thing I must look out for in order to help my students.

We then moved on to our How to Lecture, this time we were talking about copyright, I discovered that even pictures you find on the web are protected under copyright laws. I had always just thought that you could just take a picture from anywhere and it did not really matter. We were given a task where we had to identify if we were allowed to use a particular image based on the information given on the site. I struggled with this task but discovered some general information that will really help me in the future - such as if its creative commons it okay to use if you attribute where it was found, if it is in the public domain you can use it and if their is no information given do not use it. From here with this new information I had to go about changing my webpage as all my images would have been copyright infringements. I used a site to help me identify pictures I could use and changed to them to ones that don't break copyright laws.