Skip to content

Remote Learning has been a completely different experience. Although it took some time to get used to at the start, I have now familiarized myself with it. These past few weeks of online learning, I have discovered some things I like and dislike about school being online. I'm not able to make physical connections with my peers and teachers anymore. Online learning makes it harder to understand the lessons that should take an hour of teaching, but instead are fit into a 30 minute live video. I'm afraid this will have affected my understanding on some concepts in school later. Despite these, I will admit I like how it's made school much easier. There are little to no tests, and assignments are much easier. I'm also able to attend class while being in bed.

      Not being able to always fully understand the lessons is what has held me back. I have a hard time learning from a computer screen, and I'm concerned this will cause me to do poorly in my next year. Another thing that impeded me about all this is having the motivation to check all of my emails and assignments. With how slow school has been, for a little while it made all the work feel optional. The way technology has benefited me is by raising my grades because of how straightforward the work is.

       Communication is one of the proficient core competencies that I went into online school with. When I didn't understand something from a lesson, I video called my friend to have her help me until I understood. I communicated what was confusing me. A core competency I worked on and improved was personal awareness and responsibility. I made myself aware I had to take ownership over my assignments and force myself to finish them.

Infographic

This semester, my best assignment came from Science. We made an infographic based off of an environmental issue. My infographic talked about the negative effects that animal agriculture has on the environment.

A previous skill that I was able to incorporate into the assignment were persistence. I was thorough with my research, and took time to analyze the data. Another skill was creativity. I needed to be creative to make my infographic look eye-catching.

A requirement while making the infographic was making sure that text didn't take up large amount of spaces. Because of this, a challenge I faced was having to summarize lots of information. Another challenge I faced was citing sources. It was difficult to find the photographer of each image. I also had to go back and make sure every piece of information had a cited source.

1. How might your digital footprint affect your future opportunities? Give at least two examples.

A digital footprint is a mark that you leave on the internet that stays with you for all your life. Whether it be a comment, text message, or a retweet, everything that you decide to share to the media will stick with you forever. This can affect me in the near future when I am given a job opportunity. If a search is done on my name before I am given the job, and negative remarks that I made in the past come up, this will prevent me from getting the job. Although it may have seemed harmless in the moment, it's important to remember that anything I post will eventually come back to me. Another way that a digital footprint may affect me in the future is when I am applying to schools. For example, I could have a perfect university application, that could easily be ruined by a questionable social media post from years ago. Schools are cautious when investing in student applicants, so trying to prevent them from finding my digital footprint is a waste of time.

2. Describe at least three strategies that you can use to keep your digital footprint appropriate and safe.

Be mindful about what I post. Before making a post on social media, I need to be sure that it's not something that could potentially impact me in the future. I just need to stop and ask myself a few things like, is it respectful? Would I be happy if I was the person reading this? If the answer to any of those is no, then it's simple. Don't post it.

Turn on my privacy settings. On the internet, if your social media settings aren't turned to private, you should be prepared for strangers to have full access to everything you post. Instead, if you put your page on private, nothing you post will be on display for the world to see. This way it'll be less likely for my information to get leaked, and I will be kept more safe.

Strong passwords. Making sure I have a strong, complicated password is the key to avoid hackers. Hacker's goals are to get into accounts so they can expose everything you have on there to the public. Simply by making a more complex password, it'll be more difficult for someone to guess login information.

Never share my password. If I was to give my password to a close friend, and they logged into my account, chances are I wouldn't even notice. Apps like Instagram let you log into your account from multiple devices. This makes it so that if someone is on my account without making changes to my profile, they could easily be reading and saving my messages and I wouldn't notice.

3. If you could go back in time, is there anything you would do differently online? Think of what type of advice you would pass on to your younger self or other students. How could you go about explaining it to them?

Something differently I would tell my younger self is to be cautious of who you're speaking to on the internet. Since there is often no face to face communication on the digital realm, it's easy to manipulate people by using a persona. Lots of people disguise themselves as other people to gain the trust of the other person by being deceitful. The person being talked to behind the screen can be very dangerous, and later on use the information you told them to their advantage by asking for stuff from you in exchange of not leaking anything. Just be sure that if you're making friends online, you aren't getting lied to.

1

You are now going to create your very first post. In a separate tab or browser window, go to your Dashboard on the left and go to  Posts -> Add New.

1) Title - Create a title for your blog post. Your title will be: Digital Footprint Assignment

2) Body - This is where you place your content of the post - text, videos, pictures, etc. Follow the instructions on the Digital Footprint Assignment page to see what questions you need to answer here.

3) Tool Bar - In your toolbar you can "Add Media" and "Add Documents" into your posts, this is the best way to create visual representations. You can also change fonts, hyperlink, etc.

4) Publish - Here is where you control what items are public and private. You can also control when they are published to your website.

5) Categories - Here is where you choose where you want your post to go. This is your digital binder with all of your subjects. Make sure to categorize each post with the relevant subject. E.g. Categories -> English

6) Tags -  Here is where you tag posts with one or two of the most readily applicable Core Competencies. These tags can help you find things quicker on your blog and help you stay organised. E.g. Tag -> creativethinking

7) Publish - When you are done, simply "Publish" it. If it has been edited, press "Republish" to update with the latest version of the content.

Skip to toolbar