Digital Footprint Activity - 20 Questions, 4 Rounds, Grades 6-8

This digital footprint activity runs a whole class in one period: twenty team questions about the trail students leave behind, each one followed by a reveal slide that explains why the best answer wins. Built for Grades 6-8, it works as a bell ringer, a digital citizenship lesson, a sub plan, or the last ten minutes on a Friday when nobody wants a worksheet.

Every wrong option is a belief students actually hold - that deleting a post deletes every copy, that a private account stops screenshots, that a fake name leaves no trail, that only the person who typed it is responsible. The reveal slide names the trap out loud, which is where the argument starts and where the lesson actually happens.

What the twenty questions cover

• Round 1 - What You Leave Behind: copies you cannot recall, other people's posts about you, app data, school-managed devices, throwaway accounts.

• Round 2 - Before You Post: location clues in a frame, what a tag really publishes, screenshots of private chats, anger that outlives the feeling, what makes a post unrecoverable.

• Round 3 - Who Actually Sees It: the difference between the live audience and the copy, strangers who found you, what a coach or an admissions office reads, what actually shrinks a public trail, who owns a group chat.

• Round 4 - When It Goes Wrong: takedown requests that work, why denying a rumor feeds it, apology chains and edit history, building a trail that helps you later, the rules worth writing before the first post.

What you get

• 52 editable slides in PowerPoint format: teacher quick-start, five ways to run it, a scoreboard, four round openers, twenty game questions and twenty reveal slides carrying the reasoning.

• The printable twin in both Letter and A4: the same twenty questions as a team quiz, an answer key that gives the reasoning for every item, five tie-breakers and a scoring page - for a quiet round, an absent student, or a sub who does not want to project anything.

• Wildcard prompts and an exit reflection, so the last ten minutes are already planned.

• A README with the scoring rules, the five ways to play, and the two-minute steps for opening the deck in Google Slides from your own Drive.

How it scores

Two points for the best answer, one bonus point for naming the trap option. Each round caps at ten, so the quiz is out of forty and a close game stays close to the end. Bands: 31-40 Footprint Manager, 20-30 Still Checking, 0-19 Learning The Trail.

Why teachers keep it

• No login, no website, no student accounts and no district IT permission - the PowerPoint opens, a Google Slides copy opens, the PDF prints.

• Discussion is built into the scoring: students have to say which wrong option tempted them, and that sentence is the lesson.

• Fully editable - swap the fictional names, schools and apps for your own examples; the four-option shape and the scoring still hold.

• One download, two formats: project it for a loud team round or hand it out for a silent one.

More from this shop: Internet Safety Quiz, Phishing Lab, Privacy Lab, Password Lab and AI Bias Detective Task Cards.

License: one classroom, unlimited students and years. Not for public website hosting or resale. The printable quiz and answer key may be photocopied for your students.