Sat 24th Oct 2009: Queensland teachers have been forbidden from contacting their students over social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace.The new Education Queensland rules are being implemented following cases of inappropriate communication over the internet, the Courier Mailreports.
Last year in Victoria this story made headlines:
"Lewd teachers Facebook shocks children "DOZENS of students as young as 11 stumbled across steamy images of their male teacher during an innocent web search."
Whilst we are not interested in banning anyone from social networking sites, and in fact I encourage their use, I do expect teachers to to very aware of their duty of care and their legal responsibilities. We know that children as young as 6yrs old are searching their teachers names, and in one case that I heard of recently an 8 yr old boy was tracking his single teachers adventures on RSVP (an internet dating site). Your personal conduct can have serious implications and any digital footprint you leave can be used as evidence by students, parents, future, employers, insurance companies, lawyers and others.
Please ensure your private Facebook, MySpace, Ning, sites etc are all set to "private" and in Facebook all the privacy settings should be set to "Friends only". If you need help with these settings I'm happy to show you.
For safe use of social networks in a school environment you need to set up a separate identity as "teacher" and the only friends you would add would be those at the school that you wish to work with. I'm also happy to help anyone looking at incorporating social networking into their classrooms so if you have any ideas please feel free to contact me. For more info you can visit: http://www.education.vic.gov.au/teacher/socialnetworking.htm
It should be also noted that if anything inappropriate appears whilst you are searching on the internet in front of a class you are responsible for that content and any harm, offence or stress, it may inflict. If you ever find yourself in this situation "pull the power plug" and NEVER EVER give students access to your network, or any other password.
Dear Mary-Lou
ReplyDeleteVery good advice!
I myself got caught out when the year 12 Xavier boys set up an RSVP account and as a joke sent me an email which popped up as I was teaching a class!
Left my laptop unattended at the front of the classroom to help someone for a brief moment and the
boys went into My pictures and selected a photo of me looking very grubby and exhausted while bushwalking as my desktop for all to see.
Luckily these incidents were a bit embarrasing and even I saw the joke but it did make me much more careful about photos and what pops up during class. I turned off email alert and put a password on My documents.
Have had no problems ar MGGS and must admit I have got a bit lax again so thank you for the timely advice.
Cheers
Ilga