Social Media Matters

What is social media etiquette? Nothing is ever private. Even though you may think that your social media accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and twitter are private, they are not truly private. Anything you put on the internet is there forever, even if you think you took it down. So many people have ruined their careers because of social media. Whatever you would not want your job to know about do not post anything related to it on any social media account. Olivia Sprauer was a freshman English teacher who did bikini modeling on the side. One of her racy bikini photos got to the principal and she was asked to resign. She had to give up her career because she needed to make extra money and posted pictures of herself on Facebook that were not appropriate for the school setting and obviously the pictures were accessible by the wrong group of people.
Social Media can help you in your line of career. It can help you in the classroom as well. Just be careful what you share out in the social media world. Keep whats private, private.
 

Chapter 5 in The Connected Educator by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall is a great book with so many great tips for keeping things online. They tell us about tagging which is social bookmarking which is a way to organize content we access online and categorize items under labels such as Delicious. We also learned about tools for connecting and collaborating like blogs such as this website blogger or edublog. Blogs are websites that are continually updated with journal like entries that are usually organized in chronological order. Blogs are there for users to leave feedback and discussion. Edublog is similar but it is for educators to communicate with students and parents. Microblogs lets you share information quickly and efficiently with your PLN. PLN stands for personal learning network. Personal Learning Network is how you get connected with people in your line of career to learn new things or share your own experiences. For your PLN you can use twitter, wiki, or google documents. There are a bunch of tools for social networking such as Ning or classroom 2.0. There are also tools for extending learning in the classroom such as TeacherTube.