Creating a Positive & Authentic
Digital Reputation
Digital citizens must know how to manage their digital reputations! Why? Because everything and anything they post online stays online forever… and can be seen by everyone and anyone. That’s a big responsibility. It’s important for students using connected devices to know that others will make judgments about them by what they find online.
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Watch our student video to learn more:
​Tell Your Students Why It’s So Important to Put Their Best Digital Foot Forward
The days of slowly "Getting to Know You” are as ancient as the song of the same name. Today, everyone is a just a few keystrokes away from being able to make a snap character judgment. The good news is that when it comes to your students, you can help them make their online reputations as awesome as they are.
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​Share this cautionary tale with your students…Harvard is one of the most prestigious colleges in the world and possibly the most difficult one to get into. Imagine the hard work, dedication, and sizable helping of smarts it takes for a student to earn acceptance to this prestigious Ivy League school. An amazing accomplishment to be sure. Now imagine a kid losing this hard-earned acceptance, all because of something posted online during a moment of adolescent immaturity.
Yet in 2017, Harvard rescinded offers of acceptance to at least 10 incoming freshmen because of inappropriate messages and memes these young people posted in a "private” (nothing is private online) Facebook group.
As this example illustrates, there can be serious offline consequences for online actions. Increasingly, what kids post online and what others post about them can influence their future. According to a Kaplan Test Prep survey, more than two-thirds of colleges say it’s "fair game” to visit an applicant’s social media profile to help them decide who gets in. Nearly one in ten of the colleges surveyed said they had revoked an incoming student’s offer based on something they found online.
Conversely, according to another Kaplan survey, of those admissions officers who do check a prospective student’s social media sites, 47 percent report finding information that gave them a positive impression of prospective students – up from 37 percent the previous year.
More and more, colleges, employers, landlords, pet adoption agencies, and just about everyone else are turning to social media to learn more about the people they want to accept, hire, rent to, entrust with a living thing, or get to know better. So it’s important for students to make wise decisions when building and maintaining their digital footprints, starting the moment they first venture online.
​***Try this Cyber Civics “digital billboard” lesson with your students. Click on the PDF to download.
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Here is an awesome podcast on this topic.
What Our Kids Post Online Matters, Maybe Forever