Safe blogging tips for teachers

As teachers, we are expected to model best practices for our students. These include healthy lifestyle choices, a strong work/study ethic, positive and respectful interpersonal relationships, proper/safe use of equipment, and all sorts of other things that we might not have been accountable for in our non-teaching lives. Modeling is a concept that I became acquainted with after I began the graduate education program at Saint Michael's College; now, my behaviors are subject to a sort of scrutiny that I have never experienced...not even in my nearly 10-year long career in public relations!

The pressure to be a good model is sometimes grounds for frustration. As I posited to one of my Master's classes this past week, "Teachers are people too, how do we keep our frustrations and anger in check in the classroom when they are natural human emotions in difficult situations?" (it had been a challenging week for me from a classroom management perspective). The answer is that it takes some personal training of the emotional-psychological type, but the resulting best practices have really made me feel like a more centered person.

Modeling also has to occur when you're not in front of your students and with the pervasiveness of digital technologies in our culture (and the extent to which our students use them), this means being diligent with our online personalities. Many teachers have fallen prey to comments, posts, and content on their blogs, Facebooks, and MySpaces, but that doesn't mean that teachers have to avoid participating in these types of media.

Education writer Maya Payne Smart offers some tips for teachers so that they may continue blogging and social networking without being entangled in a lawsuit or embroiled in a scandal. Thankfully, they are simple and boil down to common sense.

1. Praise specifically, criticize generally: Generous and specific praise of your school and community should be key players in your blog. If you must mention your work in your personal blog, speak highly of it and offer criticisms of colleagues' actions/philosophies and other hot-button issues sparingly and as generalities. Also be mindful that extreme personal opinions and sarcasm can cause unwanted trouble, so think twice before clicking "Post."

2. Give your byline: Anonymous posts can be traced and not taking ownership of your comments and posts looks a little shady. Many teachers are posting their names, job titles, and places of work with their comments to be accountable and transparent.

3. Keep confidentiality paramount: We are a professional learning community, even online, so it stands to reason that we should use this resource and the public nature of new media to garner opinions about the issues we encounter every day. However, this does not mean using names or details about students and/or colleagues in any posts or comments. There are plenty of ways to get feedback about personality conflicts and student issues without naming names.

As for personal blogs and profile pages, I would encourage you to continue posting, but you might consider using your blog software's "invite" function to limit those with access to your personal blog (the same goes for MySpace and Facebook, which have similar "private" settings). I began blogging with a personal blog, but have since made it invite-only as I channel my energy into this one, which will serve as the basis for my class blog. When I direct my students here to comment on classwork and postings, they will see only professional or curriculum-related content. With this as a model, they should then be able to create their own personal blogs for use in class based on what I have set-up.

Read the rest of Maya Payne Smart's article and more about the potential legal ramifications for blogging teachers here.