Submitted by R. (not verified) on December 12, 2007 - 06:19.
I had a MySpace. Being a younger teacher, it was an awesome way to keep in contact with friends from college who were also beginning teachers. One day, I had some frustration in the classroom and decided to make a blog post about it. I'm not sure what happened after that - a set of parents went over my head (as in, they didn't talk to me about it) to my principal and demand that I be fired. (I'm not even sure how they saw my page in the first place due to the privacy settings.) They even took it to the Board of Education. Thankfully I was not fired, but I had to completely remove my site (severing contact with many friends/colleagues) and also do a public self reflection journal for an entire semester. I now have a "no student policy" on any of the social networks; it's just not worth the hassle, even though I'd like to show them how to use the sites responsibly.
If teachers have a social networking site, it is their responsibility to make sure that the content of the site is according to what they would like their students to know about them.
I had a MySpace. Being a
Submitted by R. (not verified) on December 12, 2007 - 06:19.
I had a MySpace. Being a younger teacher, it was an awesome way to keep in contact with friends from college who were also beginning teachers. One day, I had some frustration in the classroom and decided to make a blog post about it. I'm not sure what happened after that - a set of parents went over my head (as in, they didn't talk to me about it) to my principal and demand that I be fired. (I'm not even sure how they saw my page in the first place due to the privacy settings.) They even took it to the Board of Education. Thankfully I was not fired, but I had to completely remove my site (severing contact with many friends/colleagues) and also do a public self reflection journal for an entire semester. I now have a "no student policy" on any of the social networks; it's just not worth the hassle, even though I'd like to show them how to use the sites responsibly.
If teachers have a social networking site, it is their responsibility to make sure that the content of the site is according to what they would like their students to know about them.