In 10 Things Your Students Should Know About Their Digital Footprints, the first point was amazing. Obviously, we all know that employers and colleges look at our social media pages. But the fact that the one daughter's mother called the school trying to get her daughter in by making the other girl look bad was hilarious. Parents are crazy and I feel so bad for the daughter that did not get in because it was her mother that made the mistake. Anyway, the first daughter should not have put up such pictures for the chance of not being accepted. I liked the fifth point to make separate personal accounts because that has worked well for me in this class. I joke around a lot, and some things I say may come off the wrong way. Having a professional Twitter account like we do in this class allows me to keep things completely separate and professional on this account. Not that I post obscene things on my personal Twitter, but many friends seem to tag me in tweets about jokes I make, and I do not want anyone to take it the wrong way. Bottom line, digital footprints are everlasting. There is nothing that you can post that cannot be brought up in some way, somewhere, in the future.

I thought that these videos were cool because it explains how we are still finding the rules of internet etiquette because our parents and grandparents did not have to worry about these things until the same time that their children did. I also thought that it was crazy that there is an actual rubric for digital citizenship. That just shows how important it truly is. If you don't have anything good to say online, don't say it at all. Obviously, this should be the motto we follow all day no matter where we are, but we can at least start with something that will be there forever: the Internet.

In the end, we just need to remember that social media can be extremely beneficial in our lives. We can use it to communicate with people and to keep in touch with old friends, to find family members that you haven't seen in a while, to keep up with news topics, to create a personal learning network, to find jobs, and for countless other reasons. But we need to remember to keep our digital footprint clean, as this can change social media's beneficial attributes into detrimental situations.

We also need to stop being so addicted to Facebook......