What Do Your Student's Tweets, Posts, & Instagrams say about them? A #digcit Lesson

Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to do many workshops with mostly high school students regarding crafting their "digital footprint" or "digital tattoo".

One of the activities the students do in this workshop always hits a nerve with the majority of students ( and actually...it does with the teachers in the room as well).

Here we go!

Get out your cell phone, open the app that you use the most for social sharing.  Pull up your feed, showing your instas, tweets, FB posts....just show your own stream.

Now take ONE minute and look through your feed....choose 3 words to describe what others might assume about you based ONLY on what you have shared.

( If you have the kind of classroom culture that permits it...have the students trade phones instead and do this...OR...if you have a colleague in another building, another state etc...you could have the students connect via their social media channel and analyze each other's posts!)

I go first, sharing my twitter stream via the projector and ask the students to choose 3 words to describe me or my interests. They typically say...education, education technology, schools, teachers, New Tech Network, project based learning or other similar words.

Now...the fun begins, I ask students to share their words.

3 words that students typically use to describe them via their social media stream
drama
boys
song lyrics
whiner
friend
food
angry
silly
basketball
sports
Jesus
curser
potty mouth
funny

After everyone who wants to shares has a chance to speak...I have them think for 30 secs about if their "three words" really represents who they are as a whole person.  They generally say, not really or maybe yes, just a part of them.

Then I ask them  to think of 3 words they WISH were the most prominent.
Students then share out those three words

3 words students WISH their social media stream included. ( some are the same)
smart
talented
sports
Jesus
creative
funny
college
successful
happy
good daughter ( son)
brother ( sister)
( some version of a career...teacher, dentist, engineer, stylist etc..)

Then in groups at their tables they discuss this question...

How can we as high school students still "be ourselves" on social media while crafting a "brand of Me"

Students always come up with great strategies for this. Which I won't share because you need to be impressed with what your OWN students come up with.

This is a super simple lesson that can be a springboard to using social media as a learning tool or to get students thinking about how far reaching their online persona can be!

I'm So Much Cooler Online 

by Brad Paisley