5A - Your digital footprint matters

"We are living online, but have yet to fully realize the implications of doing so... One of those implications is that our tracks through the digital sand are eternal."

- John Batelle, New York Times, 12 June 2006

Whatever we do online, we are leaving behind digital footprints: pictures, posts and comments on social media, email records and WhatsApp chats, Skype calls, app uses, online shopping - they are all part of our online history and can potentially be seen by other people or tracked and stored in a database, enabling employers to look into our backgrounds before deciding whether to hire us and helping advertisers to track our movements across multiple websites. Therefore, no matter what we do online, it is important that we are aware of our digital footprints and what kinds of trails we are leaving in the digital sand - and what the possible effects can be.

This realisation marked the end of a teaching unit in which the students of 5A learned about, discussed and worked on the subject of media awareness and responsible media use. After engaging in various activities and research tasks related to common media use among adolescents and digital/social media's influence on young people's lives today, it was time to get creative.The students were asked to reflect on their personal digital/social media consumption and illustrate it by designing their own digital footprints, the results of which you can see below.