Teachers and Social Networking: Cleaning Up My Digital Act

Our inaugural discussion of educational technology, and especially our conversation about digital footprints, has really gotten me thinking about my own online presence.

For the most part, I would say I've tried to be very careful in my online self presentation. I use Facebook and Twitter, but in both cases I employ security settings judiciously in order to strictly limit access to my profiles. Even though these sites are "private" I've also tried to be cautious regarding the information that I post about myself within them, never assuming that there's any real privacy in the world of social networking.

Although I would consider my online presence to be fairly benign, however, I definitely think I could do some work to professionalize my digital persona. I have certainly been guilty, for example, of posting Facebook statuses that aren't exactly the height of professionalism. Here are a few status updates that I just plucked from my profile as examples:

I just tried to pay for coffee with my blood donor card.

Every watt of energy I can muster this week must be pressed into the service of academic productivity. (Sorry, unbrushed hair. Your time will come.)

Just found myself doodling hearts int he margin of a book I'm supposed to be reading for one of my final projects. Impressive scholarly thinking, no?

Do you see what I mean? While this kind of rhetoric isn't exactly harmful, it certainly doesn't lend itself to the kind of polished image I'd like to develop as someone just entering the field of education. While I also use Facebook and Twitter to share things like books I love and awesome interviews I've just heard on NPR, I've been just as likely to post links to Lolcats. I'm definitely looking forward to learning new ways I might use social networking technologies to aid in the development of my professional image, and I'm also hoping to eventually use what I learn to help my students make smart choices about their own online activities.

While learning to navigate the waters of social networking in this way can be intimidating, I truly don't believe that severing all digital is necessarily the right thing to do. It's very likely that our online presences will be examined when we've become job candidates, and really I believe that the effective use of online social networking might actually have the power to bolster a candidate's profile. After all, technology isn't going anywhere. Schools face increasing pressures to incorporate the technologies that students will need upon graduation as players in the workplace or higher academia, and instructors who can successfully navigate the world of these technologies are prime candidates for the job. I'm very much looking forward to continued discussions on this topic.

In the meantime, here are some links I've seen recently that seem relevant to our recent conversations:

• "New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology" is a great article in the New York Times about a teacher who orchestrated a staged cell phone smashing so as to make a statement about using phones in class.
• Here's a link to a story in the Charlotte Observer about teachers who have been fired or otherwise punished because of content on their Facebook pages.
• Here's an article in the Washington Post which asks, "Do the risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if students, parents and school officials don't see them? At what point are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?"
• Finally, here's a CNN story about relationships between students and teachers on social networking sites.