How Googlable are you?

While spending almost a complete weeek at home due to a bad bout of bronchitis, when I wasn't sleeping I was searching the web through my Twitter personal learning network (pln) and found several presentations by some of the people I follow who were presenting on UStream so I tuned in to a couple by Will Richardson. As I was listening in Will made a statment about when he goes in to school systems and does some professional development, he asks about how they use Google. As always many talk about how they Google applicants to see what might be out there good or bad. He then asked what they were doing about making their students "Googlable" to which they all replied "Nothing." His post about "Making Kids Googlable" can be read here.

This got me to thinking about how do we do that with our students? While I know many of our students have either Facebook or Myspace accounts, I know of a couple of teachers that work extensively with their students to help them figure out the validity of web sites using some of Alan November's techniques. After that it falls off rather drastically.

This was brought home recently when we had a situation of bullying online through some Myspace traffic between students. When one of the students was brought in her first statement was "You aren't supposed to read that, it is private." I was stunned. How could this child possibly think that? We have to continue to work to make our students more aware of what is possible on the web and how they can improve their presence by making themselve more Googlable.

So much to teach and so much to learn!