by Mary C Long
If you’re a teacher in New York City and you’re on Twitter, you may want to change the privacy settings on your Twitter account – or risk being penalized under the public school system’s newly released social media guidelines.
Are you a teacher with student followers or friends on social networking sites? You may want to rethink that policy, regardless of where you live. The new standards from New York City’s Department of Education are creating quite a buzz online and may possibly be coming to a district near you! Best to be prepared ahead of that happening.
What do these guidelines require exactly? ZDNet.com shares the guideline document here if you want to read the entire thing (and you should), but key provisions speak to two points: the maintenance of separate personal and professional accounts and specific rules detailing when it is okay for teachers to be in touch with students online. Key excerpts are included below:
As this video from The Wall Street Journal speaks to, the gist of what the new policy seems to require is common sense:
So what does this mean for Twitter? Well, it appears that teachers now be required to have private Twitter accounts as “it is a recommended practice for professional social media sites to be private networks, unless there is a specific educational need for the site to be a public network.”
Having a private Twitter account will ensure that students aren’t following a teacher without permission, of course – but private accounts are fairly counter-intuitive on Twitter. So will there be a place for teachers on Twitter going forward? Can they HAVE a separate personal presence on the microblogging platform or will that put them at risk? What do you think? Are these guidelines overdue or should teachers be allowed to “friend” or otherwise interact with students on social media sites? This post originally appeared on Social Times IMAGE CREDIT: JEREMY WILBURN
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