Digital Delights

With all of the cuts in education though, would it not be beneficial for a new teachers to start to create this type of digital portfolio?  I know some great new teachers that had to move schools or divisions because there just wasn’t enough jobs for them at the end of the day.  Will “branding” yourself and creating a digital identity/footprint that is conducive with your teaching philosophy not only help your colleagues, but create more opportunities for yourself.  It was not too long ago that Forbes Magazine published a blog entry discussing how the traditional ”resume” will be replaced by an online presence.  One of the points in the article shared how, “job seeker passion has become the deciding factor in employment“, and I believe that would be tough to show in a resume.  Through a portfolio, this could be shown over and over again through stories and shared experiences of your teaching; in a resume it would traditionally be shared through an opening paragraph.  As someone who has hired several candidates, I know that I have been able to get more of a “story” through a more comprehensive digital portfolio than I have from a resume.  If this is something that everyone is not doing (yet), won’t creating an online presence give many an advantage?  This obviously has other factors involved (who is hiring and what they are looking for, what the portfolio says, etc.), but I think that there could be many positives to this being done for new and/or experienced teachers.