It’s the ethical conundrum of our times – do you keep you social and work lives separate on social networks? For teachers, there’s the added problem of getting too close to pupils and letting down your guard. Everyone needs a some kind of work-life separation, and Facebook can seriously erode that.

We’ve been reading about one US teacher who was tracked down by the Washington Post:

Erin Jane Webster, 22, a long-term substitute teacher in Prince William, keeps a page similar to other teachers’. Portions are professional … but click “View Photos of Erin,” and you can see her lying on her back, eyes closed, with a bottle of tequila between her head and shoulder. Or click on her “summertime” photo album and see a close-up of two young men flashing serious-looking middle fingers.

Like several other teachers interviewed, Webster said she thought her page could be seen only by people she accepted as “friends.” But like those of many teachers on Facebook, Webster’s profile was accessible by the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network.

The simple motto here is don’t join the open networks on Facebook – but even friends-of-friends can amount to a lot of people.

It gets worse: teachers get fired for derogatory comments on Facebook:

Superintendent Peter Gorman has recommended firing a teacher who listed “teaching chitlins in the ghetto of Charlotte” as one of her activities and drinking as one of her hobbies.

But, as an article in Teacher magazine in the US illustrates, there can be great reasons to link up with former pupils. Locking down all the security settings may be too restrictive for some.

My teaching friends seem to take two different approaches. They can both work, but don’t mix them. Personally, I would go with the first option.

1. Keep Facebook for your personal life
One of the most positive uses of Facebook is to share the fun stuff that goes on in your life, even if it does involve some riske jokes or slightly embarrassing images. If you’re sharing it with your friends, they’ll see it for what it is. So this only works if you change the privacy settings so that only your friends can see any of the photos or messages, and that you can only invite former pupils who are over 18.

• Don’t join any networks
• Lock down your security settings
• Think carefully about including anyone with links to your school / employer in your ‘friends’ list (parents, friends of parents, governors etc)

2. Use Facebook in a limited, controlled way in school
It is possible to run a completely sanitised Facebook page, without links to the rest of your life, that you can allow your older pupils to link to. However, there are two big risks are: you may find out more than you really want to know about our class, and visa versa. Most teenagers are over-relaxed about what they chat publicly about on Facebook, and reading about their dabbling in drink, drugs or sex could open up a whole can of worms. That said, like in real live, it is possible to filter out what you want to hear.

The caveat is that your friends can post photos / comments about you that you can’t control – so opening your Facebook account up to your school depends upon the respectability of your friends as well.

In the long term, the theory goes that we’ll all become so used to personal revelations online, that it won’t cause a problem any more. But for now, you’re much safer being careful with what people see about you online.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Fun, UK teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.