Rita, a teacher from Amsterdam was appalled when a pupil showed her her private holiday snapshots taken from Facebook during a traineeship in Curacao. ‘ I didn’t wear anything indecent and didn’t throw up or anything, but it was very shocking.’ Fortunately, the same pupil taught Rita how to change the settings of her profile. ‘ I am now more aware of what I upload.’
One of my trainee teacher complained about the school management on an internet forum. Someone from the same online group forwarded this message to the director of the school. As a result the teacher was fired.
Do we need any instructions as to what we can say and do on the internet as teachers?
Does your school provide some dos and don’ts regarding your online behaviour? How is this in your country?
Here in the UK the biggest issue regarding comportment online is that of safeguarding. I assume it’s the possibility that students could potentially see their teachers in certain states of indecency, which in school management language could be anything from holding a glass of alcohol to more serious exposure. This is even the case at my college, where most of the English language provision is teaching to adults, and we the teachers are adults too obviously. Yet, safeguarding procedures stipulate that we are not allowed to be ‘friends’ with our students on Facebook, for example. This makes sense to me – I don’t want students to see what i post on Facebook because it is largely inane and could be interpreted negatively. But with something like twitter, could the same be done. Followers might not even be your own students. The potential issues are possibly even greater, but what’s the solution? Ban teachers from social media, ask everyone to lock down their profiles and make their tweets private? I’m not sure this is the best, given that we want to promote collaboration and sharing.
Would be interested to read what others have to say.
There is one very simple rule for behaviour on the internet: Assume everything is public. Of course, that’s easier to say than do.