Personal Branding for the 21st Century Educator

Sandra Rogers is Teacherrogers

Have you googled yourself lately? What does the Internet search reveal about you? As a 21st century educator, I’m building my online reputation with one search engine optimization (SEO) keyword, blog post, tweet, or project at a time. In fact, I’ve been wanting to blog about personal branding for some time because blog posts achieve higher SEO status than static websites.

Personal branding is something that most HR leaders profess as essential in today’s job market. With the plethora of free and simple Web 2.0 tools, it’s fairly easy to create your own online brand. Since my name is common, I decided to start building my own personal brand—Teacherrogers. In fact, if you google my moniker, teacherrogers, you’ll find all of my online projects and activities.

Personal branding for a 21st-century educator means showing your work online, posting your teaching philosophy, tweeting resources, and engaging in some type of “open” learning/teaching environments. Open environments online refer to free training, collaboration, or free information.  I’ve been involved with many open environments as an e-mentor. My e-portfolio hosted on WordPress is my attempt to share my work online with potential employers, students, and my professional peers. I personally believe sharing my teaching philosophy with others challenges me to revisit my long-held ideas about teaching.  It’s a work-in-progress on my to-do-list now, instead of somewhere in the back of my mind.

Are you on the shore or riding the wave when it comes to personal branding? Perhaps you joined several online learning communities and then never went back to complete your profile or never really got involved.  All these attempts will remain online forever plotting your digital pathway, so make sure you cull your online image periodically. Set up Google Alerts on your name or any other phrase that is important to you; these alerts are sent to your Gmail account immediately after something is posted online about your topic/name. Let me know if you need any help. My About Me page has my contact information.

Best Wishes,

Sandra Annette Rogers