A Strategic Online Presence for Secondary Students

Students may have an online presence distributed over a number of services and created over a number of years. Some may no longer be in use - even forgotten. These present a risk to identity and reputation management.

A strategic approach is needed that will help create a purposeful and professional online identity and reputation.

Students need a safe and secure online presence that they can control and which will populate web searches with positive content.

As seen in the previous two posts students seeking jobs, scholarships and more... also require an ePortfolio, a LinkedIn profile, an online resume and compelling evidence that showcases their knowledge, skills and interests.

An eportfolio could be used as a space to showcase evidence via selected social media as well as displaying a resume and other more formal evidence.

Two or three social media services such as YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn could be selected and managed to host compelling evidence for a job application. These could be linked or embedded inside an eportfolio.

A resume, assessment results and certificates/prizes could also be uploaded to the eportfolio.

The eportfolio owner could then generate a private URL which would be sent to a potential employer.

In this way a student could begin to strategically manage their online presence and reputation.

However, while a student can manage eportfolio access care needs to be exercised with the selected social media services. Potential risks and strategies to deal with these will be examined in the next post.