Every so often, journalists feel they need to give advice to teachers about becoming Facebook friends with their students. The most recent two-cents was contributed by NBC’s Today show.
After collecting 1,948 votes in an online survey, NBC reports that most people think students and teachers should neither text each other one-on-one nor befriend each other on social media.
Citing a former school administrator who works with schools to implement social media policies, journalist Alexandra Rockey Fleming says it’s pointless to try to talk to kids about how scary the Internet is, as they simply don’t believe it.
So, what can you do? Here are four pieces of advice for teachers when it comes to communicating with students using either text messages or social media:
- Write up a school policy for how teachers should and shouldn’t act with communication and networking technology.
- Don’t friend, follow, or otherwise engage with students on social media directly. Teachers need to be especially careful when it comes to posting images.
- Texting with students is OK about assignment-related issues, as long as the text messages could just as easily be sent to any other student and could be viewed by everyone in the world.
- Because every student with a smartphone can take and publish pictures, schools should write up a privacy policy addressing being photographed without permission.
What good can come of it?
From my perspective, assuming all parties involved behave themselves and use social media like the good citizens they are, the real question is, What does the use of social media get you?
Most research involving empirical evidence rather than just opinions in a poll suggests there’s not much social media has to offer for teachers and students.
A 2010 literature review written by Khe Foon Hew in Computers in Human Behavior suggests that Facebook has very little educational value. “Students tend to use Facebook mainly to keep in touch and … tend to disclose more personal information about themselves, hence attracting potential privacy risks,” the article says.
For what purposes do students at your school use Facebook? The research article noted a small group of people who use Facebook to find out about schoolwork. This use, however, was only a fraction of the total time spent on Facebook, and we suspect you’ll find other purposes at your school. Some common uses: maintaining existing relationships, meeting new people, making oneself more popular, and passing the time.