Educators: Your Personal Life May No Longer Be Personal

In lieu of all of the newest Facebook changes, here's a quick follow up post to our Ten Things Educators Should Know in the 20-Teens article and come back to #4: Your Personal Life May No Longer be Personal.

After the most recent changes that included user to "Like" content outside of Facebook (Thus allowing information to leak out of the site), there were a few negative responses from the community urging Facebook to reconsider it's breach of the privacy threshold.

As educators, this is simply an alarming reminder to stay wary of what to post online in our profiles and other content.  With camera phones only being a recent innovation, a veteran educator may not sense the threat of unprofessional images cropping up in their supervisor's inbox of something they did in the past.  However, an interesting new article points to the fact that the younger crowd are beginning to learn rather quickly.

Posted at eSchoolNews, studies have shown that youth are more apt to watch their privacy settings than the previous generations.  It is becoming more common for a student entering the working world to hack and slash their profile to skin and bones, eliminating tags to unprofessional photos and cleaning up their "interests" and "hobbies."

"I have to present a public face that doesn't have the potential to hurt my image," says Marlene McManus from the article as she "scours" her profile of photos from college exploits.  This is so key, and portrayed very nicely through @edtechsteve and his video on digital footprints.

But it's not just students who are trying to enter the working world.  Educators must also be wary from the opposite end of the spectrum.  If a teacher has a Facebook account, it may be harsh to simply ignore friend requests from students.  A simple solution some educators are taking is creating a second account, starting afresh without the danger of sharing content that was not meant to be seen.

Critics seem to be running out of arguments.  After once claiming that "[online] relationships could cause bias when the instructor gives his or her students a grade," we are beginning to see that a social media account is as expected as having a cell phone in today's era.  From the same article, "Proponents of using online social networks to reach students say it makes sense to go where students are already spending much of their time online."  By separating the professional from the personal, educators may find a handy tool to assist in conducting an engaging classroom.