Why your school needs clearly defined social media policies

It’s not to stop teachers from doing the wrong thing with social media; It’s to give them confidence to use social media well, knowing there is no appearance of impropriety.

If there were no balustrade on the ‘Pinnacle’ lookout in the Grampians, very few people would venture to the edge to take in the arresting view.  The barrier gives hikers confidence to go further than they would otherwise dare, because their safety is assured.  The railing doesn’t restrict people; it liberates them to go further!

The railing doesn’t restrict people; it liberates them to go further!

Is it appropriate for a teacher to reply to a student’s electronic message at 9:00 pm? 11:00 pm? I don’t think there is a universal answer to that question, but I do think there should be a school policy about it.  If a student sends a text at 9:45 pm, and the school policy says 10 pm, a teacher can confidently reply, leaning against the balustrade of that policy.

I meet a lot of teachers who are reluctant to use “this website” or “that web 2.0 service” with their students for fear that doing so might make them the star of a story on 7’s Today Tonight (and not in a good way).  That fear can be soothed by creating well publicised, unambiguous and clearly defined policies.

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Keeping Students Safe in a River of Content

How can we protect our students from certain kinds of information and content on the internet?  It used to be so easy to do. Ten years ago, most students’ only internet access was at school. Teachers really had complete control over what information students were exposed to, and importantly to this discussion, what information they were not exposed to.  If information were water, it was a trickling brook and it was not hard to build a weir, or divert water so that it missed our students, keeping them safe.

But carrying the same analogy forward, now, if information were water it would be a river.  Its impossible to divert water to avoid it reaching our students.  If we as teachers stand in the river, trying to divert the water to protect our students, it will just swirl around us as though we weren’t even there.  Instead we need to work with our students, and help them to safely negotiate the river of information that they are in.  “Put your foot on that rock there, be careful! there’s a deep spot there, look out for that eddy!”.

Now I am not arguing that we should stop filtering content altogether.  There are some things that we must do to try to protect students from inadvertently stumbling upon unsavory material.  But (and here is the crux of my argument) if students are going to deliberately SEEK unsavory material, the fact is, we can no longer stop them even if we try to. They have internet at home, the tech-savvy ones can often get around our filters at school, they have mobile phones with internet access.  The only way to stop students finding unsavory material is to influence them so they no longer want to deliberately SEEK it out.

At the moment, our failing attempts to protect the few ill-meaning students who deliberately seek out offensive content, are successfully frustrating the educational experience of the well-meaning majority of students.

HOW we change the attitudes of those ill-meaning students, is another (and more challenging) topic.  But in an information-rich world, the role of a teacher can no longer be “information-controller”, it must increasingly be “shaper-of-attitudes”.

Schools used to be able to choose between shaping the choices of students (“difficult”) and just blocking the content (“easy”).  I don’t think we have that choice any more, as blocking content is no longer “easy” but “nearly impossible”.