Support Others in Protecting Personal Data

Coaches should help coachees stay safe digitally, consider their digital footprint and consider what information they share in profiles and how they interact online.

Everybody needs to consider their digital footprint, and how they are ‘marketing’ themselves. Educators need to help other staff and pupils understand the relevance of digital footprints, and what they are revealing about themselves online.

It is often alarming when you perform an online search and see how much information some people give away about themselves.

Child appropriate and private platforms can be a good place for educators to guide pupils to practise writing the information they want to convey about themselves. This includes sites like Flip, which now sits within Microsoft Teams, where pupils can record videos of themselves and view their peers' videos.

Power Apps also allow for the creation of bespoke platforms with opportunities for profile pages where pupils can learn about profile content in a safe environment e.g. within Teams. Pupils will understand the value of connectedness when they like and comment on each others’ profiles in a safe environment.

Coaches can ensure that pupils know how to be safe online and how to share the right content, and also the importance of connecting and engaging with others.

Here are my top three useful sites.

• Common Sense Education with lots of resources for teaching digital citizenship

• Boxphish which is a cybersecurity training platform

• Interland , a fun interactive site for pupils to learn about safety and secury

ISTE describes how ‘Coaches should create a working environment based on shared learning, teaching goals and distributed leadership that involves transparent decision making, willingness to accept feedback from peers and subordinates, collaboration on establishing policies, and trusting and mobilising teaching staff to make appropriate decisions. Coaches should empower educators, leaders and students to make informed decisions by understanding how networked devices e.g. phones, smart devices and online sites collect user information and implement settings that control levels of data that at an individual wants to share. Coaches should empower coachees to have the ability to represent themselves online based on activities or connections, and tagging through social media posts, photos, online comments or reviews.’