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Education Dive
School, district social media policies must
tackle pitfalls as well as opportunities
Shawna De La Rosa
Feb. 14, 2019
Dive Brief:
Developing a district-wide social media policy is important, but
challenging — requiring an approach flexible enough to adapt to
changing trends and thorough enough to address difficult scenarios
involving students, staff and faculty, District Administration reports.
A district communications director is the natural go-to person to
launch this project, in instances where that role exists, and the
policies should focus on behavior rather than technology used.
At the school level, focus must be on monitoring how social media
affects on-campus behavior and learning — with cyber-bullying that
takes place off-campus, for instance, addressed if it affects at-school
learning — while district policies should include expectations and
guidelines for teachers’ use of personal accounts that include
interactions with students and how they use social media in their daily
lives.
Dive Insight:
Learning to utilize social media can be a daunting task fraught with
the potential for flubs and even major missteps. But avoiding social
media all together may be the biggest mistake of all.
Creating strong policies will encourage responsible behavior by
students, staff and faculty. Setting the guidelines can begin by
stressing the importance of personal responsibility and outlining the
boundaries of communication between staff and students, as well as
families, on social media. Kristin Magette's "Embracing Social Media: A
Practical Guide To Manage Risk And Leverage Opportunity" is a good
resource when tackling this process.
The social media policy shouldn't focus only on the problems, however.
It can also address how to best use each of these platforms to spread
good news from the district level all the way down to individual
classrooms, instructing teachers how to best connect with parents,
students and other education professionals.
Monica Burns, an ed tech and curriculum consultant who founded the
Class Tech Tips service, told District Administration article that
Facebook posts, for example, should include a clear message or call to
action. Use of the tagging function encourages individuals to spread
the message. A picture, meanwhile, says 1,000 words, and that’s where
Instagram comes in. While Twitter is also a good option and can be an
excellent way to spread information about the classroom to other
professionals in the industry, many parents don’t follow it. Some
teachers also use it to connect their students to classrooms on the
other side of the world.
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