Today in EdTech, we had the privilege of having Jesse Miller come to speak to us about privacy and professional responsibility as an educator.
I was so interested in the parts of the presentation that focused on our digital identity and how it intersects with our professional identity as educators. While I thought I was pretty well-versed in internet safety, Miller gave us a new perspective on how we need to think about everything that we are putting online. It seems clichéd, but I had not thought before about how much more students are going to be online and how much more eager they are now to catch us out as educators doing something they consider inappropriate online. When I was a high school student, we would try to find out teachers on Facebook and laugh when we found them and could see their profile pictures, but it stopped there. Now there are a myriad of different platforms that we as teachers are on and can therefore be surveyed by students.
In addition, I enjoyed the Miller’s discussion of our three audiences: public/parents, staff, and students. Of course, I wouldn’t be one of those teachers we looked at that hashtagged #teacherproblems, but things such as informing the school if you are sharing your cell phone number during a field trip with students are things that I would have not had considered before as something innocent that could be perceived as problematic without it being disclosed.
Although using technology as a teacher considering privacy and ethos of care can be daunting, I now feel more confident that there are ways to use social media and technology as an educator, as long as we are aware of school expectations and policies of the employer, when and how you should disclose things.