Social Media Safety as a Teacher, or alternatively: The Class that Made Me Paranoid

In this week’s class we discussed how to be on the internet as a teacher. This is something I have been thinking about for several years now as I have begun to enter the world of working with youth. In my undergrad, as we were starting to build networking relationships with other local music educators, we were warned by our professors to be wary of the things that we post on social media – at that point it was more of a reminder to un-tag ourselves from photos where we may be drinking alcohol or at a nightclub. As I began actually working with youth, those values remained, but they also evolved into questioning whether I wanted students to be able to find me on social media. This is where I had to question what my values and purpose were on using social media – I’ve matured a bit since those days and realized that, while getting likes from strangers used to be important to me, I have to have different priorities now because I don’t want students or parents knowing too much about my personal life, and all my accounts are now private.

This lecture, especially the stories of things going wrong, made me paranoid. I worry about things I may have posted on social media when I was young and naive that I no longer have easy access to (like tweets from 2013, for example). I have begun to question whether I want to have social media at all. I certainly went through all my settings after the class was over to ensure that only the people who I want to see what I post have access to my content. I have noticed that some of my peers who have taken the PDP Program before have changed their names on Facebook to not include their last names, and I am wondering whether this is something I should do too.