Social Media Exchanges and Teacher/Student Boundaries

Anyway, yelling about thirteen is a red herring as that is some kind of internet cutoff.

Certainly interesting but I wonder how the school district authorities are going to enforce such rules. Monitor their teachers' and students' online behavior?

School administrators are also concerned about teachers’ revealing too much information about their private lives. As part of a policy adopted last month in Muskegon, Mich., public school employees were warned they could face disciplinary charges for posting on social media sites photos of themselves using alcohol or drugs.

I'm interested in teacher student boundaries. I'd like to see much more discussion on this.

Certainly interesting but I wonder how the school district authorities are going to enforce such rules. Monitor their teachers' and students' online behavior?

I don't know about monitoring the students, I don't think they have the authority to do that outside of a school-run network, but they could monitor the teachers on social networking sites, as long as the rules are in place beforehand. They could also respond to complaints made by parents or others who see problematic postings by teachers on sites such as Facebook.

Monitoring the teachers, or responding to complaints, would probably be the only way of enforcing something like this.

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School administrators are also concerned about teachers’ revealing too much information about their private lives. As part of a policy adopted last month in Muskegon, Mich., public school employees were warned they could face disciplinary charges for posting on social media sites photos of themselves using alcohol or drugs.

It is my impression that enforcement woud be against the teachers only,
since the schools have no authority over the students. Thay can 't fire the Students (nor dock their pay!).

Look at some of the legal cases where students had been punished by the schools for actions
taken off school ground and on non school times including for materials placed on the internet from home computers.

Is there a law against conversation??

What is "peej"??

There can be when you are dealing with a minor and promoting bad behaviors out of him or her.
There is a legal name but I am not coming up with it now.

And setting up meetings and going to meetings with a minor
or an assume minor is illegal see the TV shoe to catch a predator.

David, I'm in one of my episodes of no tolerance at all for your expression format.

Could you please summarize in regular english your last batch of posts?
I can work it out but I don't want to look at it.

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What do others here feel about this? Should private cell phone conversations, and exchanges on social media sites, between teachers and students, be banned or restricted in any way?

As a parent first and teacher second, I can unequivocally say that if student is under eighteen, the parent or legal guardian needs to be involved in or aware of all of my out-of-the-classroom communication with any student.
As a parent, I do not want any teacher communicating with my child by any means which excludes me.
URL: http://able2know.org/topic/181789-1

Using Social Media to Teach: Keep It Transparent, Open and Safe
Dec. 19, 2011
By Charol Shakeshaft

Social media can be used to target, groom and harm students. But it can also be used to boost student learning and engagement. By taking care to make intentional decisions about how to use social media and keep professional and private lives separate, educators can take advantage of the wonderful learning opportunities that Twitter, Facebook and texting offer.

I write from the perspective of an educator and a researcher who has been deeply examining educator sexual misconduct for more than a decade. Across the hundreds of cases I have been directly connected to, many involved some form of electronic communications between the “trusted adults” and the students.

Educators who use social media for personal and intimate conversations and contact are not much different from those who spend their time hanging out with students at the beach. You have to ask why a teacher would do this. The honest answer is that it rarely has anything to do with student learning.

Yet there is no foolproof method to keep student communication walled off from personal communication when using a single social media site. I thought there might be some neat tricks I could share that would allow safe personal and private use of Facebook. There aren’t. We tested privacy settings and other tactics to wall off student access, but there were always loopholes.

So it comes down to this: The best method to embrace social media to promote learning and engagement while making it safe (as well as preserving teacher and student privacy) is to separate the personal from the professional by having separate accounts.

That said, there are transparent and open approaches for using social media for learning.

Facebook
Don’t friend students to your personal Facebook account. As Vicki Davis points out in Cool Cat Teacher Blog, even if you don’t post things that shouldn’t be there, you might have a friend who does. Your students will have access to that.

Moreover, you are allowing people who might not be safe to have access to your students. For a really good demonstration of how friends of friends can put you and your students in harm’s way, read Ms. Davis’s blog post on this.

Instead, have a separate teacher account. Also consider using Groups and Fan Pages to communicate with students and parents.

In Facebook for Educators, the authors point out that members of a group don’t need to be friends. When someone posts, the message goes to everyone in the group.

Groups can be open, closed or secret. The open option lets everyone participate. The closed option allows only those invited into the group to see content, although all group members’ names can be seen. A secret group page does not identify group members and interaction is open only to those invited.

Of these three, the best option for a class or with a group of students is the closed group. Names are listed, so it is clear that this isn’t a one-on-one ruse, but the closed option allows some privacy for group discussions, questions and comments.

Every member of the group can see what every other member is posting, but the posts are shielded from those not in the group.

While an open group can always be seen by other teachers, parents and administrators, a closed group can also include access beyond the students in the class.

Once a group is established, Pages is a great and safe way to connect with students. Everything necessary to be a good, caring and engaged teacher can be done in a safe, transparent and open Page. Conversations can occur, homework assignments can be posted, links to resources added, and questions can be answered.

The downside to Pages is that it is open and students could be targeted by someone dangerous. However, if Pages is used within a group context, the participants are shielded from outsiders.

Twitter
Creating a private Twitter account for your students allows you to share information and send comments about course topics.

A public account, separate from your personal Twitter account might also be created, but this will allow others outside the class to participate, which might not serve the purpose you have for twittering with your students.

Texting
Use the same judgment you would use in having private conversations with students in making texting decisions.

Most of the time, texting a student is unnecessary. Student questions and comments can go on the Facebook Page.

While texting can be very useful on a field trip for getting students back to the bus, most of the time an open and transparent format, such as Pages, will do the job.

All Social Media
Think about what you want to accomplish with social media. Think about how you would have behaved prior to social media.

If you wouldn’t have had a clandestine meeting in a secret place, then don’t communicate secretly using social media, either.

Social media, just like plain old face-to-face talk, can be used for both good and evil. Is your use of social media transparent, open and safe?

If the answer is yes, you’re most likely using social media appropriately with students.

Dr. Charol Shakeshaft is chairwoman of the Department of Education Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is an expert in educator sexual misconduct.
http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2011/12/19/using-social-media-to-teach-keep-it-transparent-open-and-safe/

aidan wrote:

Quote:

What do others here feel about this? Should private cell phone conversations, and exchanges on social media sites, between teachers and students, be banned or restricted in any way?

As a parent first and teacher second, I can unequivocally say that if student is under eighteen, the parent or legal guardian needs to be involved in or aware of all of my out-of-the-classroom communication with any student.
As a parent, I do not want any teacher communicating with my child by any means which excludes me.
URL: http://able2know.org/topic/181789-1

I agree. I can't see anything that needs to be added or changed.

I'm interested in teacher student boundaries. I'd like to see much more discussion on this.

Yes indeed the non-pedophiles the vast vast vast vast majority of teachers are going to be limited in their abilities to enact and teach the next generation...

I'm interested in teacher student boundaries. I'd like to see much more discussion on this.

When my daughter was at college (16-18yrs old) she did exchange emails with her teachers.
Now she's at University she does it all the time.
However, the email accounts used, are ones administered/monitored by the College/University, [????] and are just for academic exchanges. Doing this maintains the professional student teacher relationship. Once you start using social media, boundaries are blurred, and the teacher can find themselves in a difficult situation through no fault of their own. When I was teaching, I didn't want my students to know about the stag do in Amsterdam I'd just been to. I did want them to know about the role of the witches in Macbeth.