Is My Cyber-Self A Reflection Of The Real Me?

This lesson gets student's unnerved. As part of our Digital Citizenship Unit, we explore the concept of Digital Reputation, and it's easy to give opinions about other's online habits, but once we ask students to explore their own digital reputation, the class gets tense. We ask students to gather up all their social networking posts for the last month (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine, etc.)  this represents their cyber-selves. Then we ask them to ask their parents, siblings, three friends and one teacher/coach to each give three words to describe them, this represents their real selves. Then we ask them to use Wordle to create two word clouds, one for each side of them. They then analyze the word clouds and reflect: 
  Is my cyber-self a reflection of my real self?

Julia's word clouds are similar...

Real Self:



Cyber Self:



I think that my digital self is very similar to my real self. Online I talk about things that come from my real self and have to do with my life outside of the internet. Outside of the internet I do the same things and talk about the same things that I do on the internet. There is not really a difference between my real self and my digital self they are both pretty much the same. I am not fake online or in person and I don’t hide behind a different identity. I am me, online and offline.



Patrick thinks he act's different online...

Cyber-Self



Real Self



My cyber self is not like it seems. I have an Xbox and sometimes when people are mean to me I am mean back. Sometimes my friends and I troll people for fun and they get mad. On my social networking I don’t do that stuff. II don’t use it. My real self is nothing like my cyber self. I am usually nice to people but when they tick me off I am mean back.