The Digital Footprint of a Future Teacher: Awareness Diagnostics and Self-Assessment of Professional Qualities

Purpose. The article examines such a relevant concept in the modern information society as a digital footprint, and raises issues of applying the analysis of students’ digital footprint data. The authors analyze the specifics of the students’ digital footprint of a pedagogical university, emphasizing the need for the future teachers to explore the possibilities of using technologies for analyzing digital footprint data in their professional activities and characterize the relevant competencies. At the same time the authors emphasize the lack of sufficient research devoted to the analysis of the students’ digital footprint in relation to the professional training of future teachers. This makes it possible to formulate the problem of the paper: what level of awareness do the students of a pedagogical university have about their own digital footprint and do they know how to analyze it? The purpose of the article is to identify the level of future teachers’ awareness about the concept of a “digital footprint”, the ways to collect and analyze it, as well as the role that their digital footprint on the Internet has on their own image and future professional activities.
Materials and methods. To solve the problem and achieve the purpose of the paper the authors use such methods as testing (first-year students of Omsk State Pedagogical University took part in it), performing tasks for self-assessment of the digital footprint by second-year students. For self-assessment of the digital footprint by students of pedagogical universities, the authors formulated criteria based on the professional qualities that a teacher should possess.
Results. As a result of the testing the authors formed three groups of students, selected based on their knowledge of the digital footprint: low, medium and high levels. The third group turned out to be the smallest one: only twelve people (13% of respondents) showed a high level of knowledge about the digital footprint. An analysis of the work shows that some students perfectly realize how their online behavior is related to the image of the teacher, others can only see the obvious risks, but do not take into consideration the hidden consequences of their actions, still others realize the importance of a digital footprint in theory, but do not apply this knowledge in practice.
Conclusion. The general conclusion that can be made based on the conducted research, there is a lack of a systematic approach and strategy for managing the digital footprint. Most students have disparate ideas about the digital footprint; there is no skill in deep analysis of long-term consequences. The following means that the additional work to create a professional online image of the teacher, especially in terms of positioning and public interaction is required. It is necessary to include a module on digital footprint, digital hygiene and ethics of online teacher behavior in the curriculum.

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