Crafting a Digital Identity

Session 3

Rafranz David, Becky Fisher, Jeffrey McClurken, Jennifer Orr, Tim Stahmer — Arlington ISD, Albemarle (VA) Public Schools, University of Mary Washington, Fairfax County Public Schools

Room 1182

As events in the news, recent court cases, and laws about the right to be forgotten show, one’s digital identity can have a significant impact on professional and personal lives. This is a critical issue for educators to understand, both for themselves and for their students. This session will explore various questions, including: What does digital identity mean for us as individuals and professionals? What does digital identity mean for the children in our family (be it our daughters/sons or others close to us)? What does digital identity mean for our students? In addition, we will discuss the implications of gender, race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, geographic location, and equity of access for digital identity.

These are issues that are faced, albeit in different ways, by our students from kindergarten through college and beyond. It is essential that we as educators are prepared to help them develop their online identities in ways that are thoughtful, positive, and appropriate.

We also need to be able to develop our own digital identities in ways that provide models for our students, foster skills useful in our own teaching, and advocate for the teaching profession in the larger world.

Conversational Practice

We will start by having participants Google themselves (or if they are regular practitioners of the vanity search, then we will have them Google their school, their district, or their best friend).

We will then move to our own brief answers to the three questions above.

Then we will have the audience weigh in as smaller groups (with key ideas brought back to the big group) on each topic in order.

After some conversation about views, concerns, hopes, we will ask the audience to help us construct a Google Doc with strategies and resources