As a teacher, I really need to think about what I put online. This is crucial if I am looking for future jobs, especially in some more reserved countries. It will also help sculpt the image I want to portray of myself, not only for future employers, but also for other people including fellow teachers and students.
One of the things I need to really be careful with is having my picture taken, mainly in social settings because anything nowadays can be misinterpreted. There are a lot of pictures of me online that were pre-teacher age, or when I was a student, that could not be very appealing for new job prospects, so it's probably best for me to remove most of those pictures. I need to create an image that can be better perceived as an educator, especially if I want to teach younger kids in the future.
I also need to make myself a harder target to be found in the search engines. I can do this by putting my privacy settings on high in all of the webpages I join, and make sure that anything I want to put out there is only shared with the people I want it to be shared with. Even then, anything can get out in the infinite cosmos of the world wide web, so it is probably best to only share what would be acceptable to not only my friends and family, but also to future employers.
Any comment, post, tweet, etc., should carefully be assessed by me before I air it out into cyberspace. Any comment can be misconstrued, judged wrongly, or taken out of context.
These are some of the steps I can take to sculpt a better digital reputation for myself. With so much information accessible out there, as an educator, I really want to leave a positive reflection of myself in the digital world.
Analia, I’m really on board with your post. I like how you’ve stated concise points that you feel need to be followed, in order to display an online reputation that is respectable. I completely agree that as teachers, we need to be careful with what we put online, especially in relation to future employment. I agree that it is a good idea for us to make ourselves a harder target online by cranking up our privacy settings. I actually had this happen to me a few years ago, when students from my previous academy knew intricate details about me just from looking at my Facebook page. At that time my privacy settings weren’t turned on and they could find out way more about me than I wanted. I quickly turned my privacy settings on, and since then I’ve had no problems… Fingers crossed!
ReplyDeleteFinally, it’s defiantly a great idea for us to carefully assess what we put on the web from sites like Twitter. How many celebrities have gotten themselves in trouble by posting stupid tweets? Let’s hope that we can avoid the same fate. Great post, a pleasure to read!
Good points, and remember that as teachers we are held to much higher standards than celebrities, especially when looking for our next job.
DeleteGood point on the celebs and thanks for commenting Colin :)
ReplyDeleteAnalia, good post. I concur on a lot of your points. Probably most of the dicey pictures of me are pre-teacher or pre-wanting to be a professional teacher. A lot of those pictures I can blame on you. ha Kidding. I definitely agree with your point about risking potential job prospects if my reputation is not up to snuff. I too have went through the social networking sites I participate in more thoroughly to make sure that my privacy settings are working are protecting the information I want to remain private. I guess we all have a fair bit to learn about improving our digital footprint. Great post, look foward to reading more. ;)
ReplyDelete*working AND protecting* oops sorry.
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas for building your online reputation, and also some great advice for anyone thinking about what they would like their reputation to be in the future.
ReplyDeleteI like where your head is at in terms of creating a more professional digital footprint, even if that means going through old photos and deleting them or removing them from online databases. The customization of privacy settings, particularly on "rostro libro" has become more and more detailed and secure over time, so I think there is really no reason why we can't manage the online content from the past to portray a more professional image today. I agree, most pics floating around from college are best left off the internet when it means you are now a working adult...or at least pretending to be the latter.
ReplyDelete