Teachers friending students on Facebook? Surely, most faculty would assume it was a fine line, so they never really did it. Or did they? Perhaps stories like those in Oklahoma involving student teacher spring-break flings, late night texting and direct tweeting scared them from trying. One Oklahoma district has shown concern and placed a strict social media policy, while most other U.S. schools are still scratching their heads.Even so, the local Department of Education will make it easier on New York City teachers to sort out the nebulous world of social media. The DOE is paving the way with a new set of social media guidelines that prohibit the practice of friending and informal-personal communications between student and teacher outside the classroom.Feeling guilty about having to reject a student? No problem: The new DOE social media guidelines offers its faculty a cheat-sheet on how to smoothly operate their refusals:If DOE employees receive a request from a current DOE student to connect or communicate through a personal social media site, they should refuse the request. The following language is one suggested response: "Please do not be offended if I do not accept or respond to your request. As a DOE employee, the agency’s Social Media Guidelines do not permit interactions with current DOE students on personal social media sites. If you do want to connect, please contact me through the school (or class) page at ____ [insert link]."While adopting the usefulness of social media and cloud technology has been a positive experience in other educational applications, the DOE’s guidelines are hip to the differences between, say, Edmodo and Badoo.Why is it a recommended practice to have separate professional and personal social media sites and email addresses? The reason for this distinction is to ensure separation between personal and professional spheres of online communication for DOE employees. In this context, this separation is intended to clarify that professional social media and personal social media are different. Professional social media is work-related and may involve employee-to-student communication. Personal social media is not work-related, and subject to certain exceptions noted in the Guidelines, does not involve employee-to-student communication.On the collegiate level, you could recall Harrisburg University of Science and Technology’s failed attempt to ban social media for one week. While the halt made an angle toward critically assessing the way that students value and use online platforms, it mostly just added to theses that there is no chance in draining the student brain of its social media crack addiction.Dividing social media tools that enhance professional educational communication from personal social medias termed ‘non-work’ is the ticket. The new DOE guidelines understands this, not looking to monitor student to student or faculty to faculty communications over networks. As an ever-mutating interweb is woven, student-to-faculty sexting, ‘innocent’ pokes and likes meet the black widow’s bite.
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