For those heading into the teaching profession in a web-dominated world, scrutiny doesn’t end with the job interview. Teachers in the digital generation have to manage their online personas all the time. No one wants to lose out on a dream job over an ill-advised tweet, or a dodgy Instagram photo.
“Potential teachers need to bear in mind that parents may be looking up the content you post thinking, ‘gosh, that person’s looking after my child,’ and making judgments about that,” says Will Gardner, chief executive of Childnet International.
There are also the pupils themselves to contend with. “If you’ve got content about yourself up on the internet, the kids will always find it,” says Laura Pearce, head of ICT computing at St Lukes College Exeter. “Even if it’s not particularly exciting, anything they can find on you they will use, and it can feel intrusive.” Pearce avoids using Facebook and keeps separate Twitter accounts for professional and personal use.
Disciplinary incidents involving social media in education have been on the rise. “In the last year we had 11 or 12 cases involving online behaviour,” says Lindsay Thompson, head of fitness to teach at General Teaching Council Scotland, an independent regulatory body which adjudicates on cases of professional misconduct. “We’ve definitely seen an increase recently.”
“There was one NQT we supported who’d taken a year out to go backpacking and on her Facebook there were lots of photos of her in bikinis on the beach having a wonderful time,” says Laura Higgins, online safety operations manager at the UK Safer Internet Centre. “Unfortunately some of these had got into the public arena. So she got called in and told to take them down.”The examples that make the headlines tend to involve dubious photos, Facebook rants about students, or inappropriate communication with children, but teachers commonly get into trouble for less egregious errors in judgement.
Coming straight from university into a teaching context it can be hard to adjust to the need for self-censorship. “People will often say, ‘aren’t I entitled to a private life?’ But if you choose to make that private life public you need to bear in mind what you’re doing,” says the Association of Teachers and Lecturer’s lead member adviser, Ken McAdam. “All staff should act in accordance with the IT policy that a good employer should already have in place, they should bear in mind that humour is relative, and that what they post online could be used to bring the school into disrepute.”
Even though Facebook allows you to control both your overall profile visibility and who sees individual posts, you still need to be careful about what you post. Facebook is notorious for changing how privacy works, so it’s advisable to review regularly what information is available to those outside your friendship group.
That aside, the most common cases to come through the UK Safer Internet Centre’s helpline are those involving posts about you by others. Higgins says: ““A great example was this young man, very sensible, had privacy settings on all his accounts. However, the children at school found his girlfriend’s Instagram, downloaded all the pictures of him from her account, then bombarded her with friend requests.”“It may even be that you end up teaching the child of one of your friends, or your younger sibling attends the same school,” Thompson points out. Anyone in your group can take a screenshot of some dubious internet activity and show it around, and once that’s happened there is no way of taking it back.
With friends and family at least you can talk to them in person and ask them to take things down, but when students or parents are posting negative things about you, things are more difficult. The first option should be to talk to your line manager who can take appropriate action, but if the content is seriously defamatory, for example a student setting up a fake account under your name, then the site itself can be contacted about taking it down. “They all have webmaster tools, like Google’s right to be forgotten,” says Higgins. “Google itself can’t take things off the website for you, but if information about you has been cached you can request to have it removed from search listings.”
So what happens if it’s too late, and unflattering content about you has made it into the hands of your employer? The UK Safer Internet Centre can provide assistance in clearing up the parts of your online presence.
“If a teacher finds themselves facing a disciplinary hearing, they should make immediate contact with their trade union for advice and support,” says Chris Keates, general secretary of the teachers’ union Nasuwt.
Nobody wants to scare teachers away from social media entirely. “Twitter is amazing from a training perspective, there are so many teachers sharing resources,” says Pearce.
“We don’t want to say teachers should stop using social media, because social media is a part of everybody’s lives,” Gardener agrees. “But you do just need to give it that extra little bit of thought.”
Reference: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/10/teachers-tripped-up-by-facebook-rants-and-bikini-pics?utm_content=bufferf6f37&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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