One common question I see asked all the time is whether or not teachers should friend students on Facebook. Although you can set your privacy settings on Facebook to hide certain aspects of your life from groups of friends, this isn’t fool proof. Friending everyone including students and parents simply begins breaking down yet another wall between your professional life and personal life.
What you can do is create a Facebook Page for yourself. This gives you a presence on Facebook that can be used professionally which is totally separated from your person life.
“A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users. Create one in a few minutes with our simple interface.”
Unfortunately, your created page has a very unwieldy url. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ryan-Collins/181385642299. What I’ve done is setup a redirect from my website to point http://ryancollins.org/facebook to my Facebook Page. Be sure to become a friend when you visit!
Facebook Pages are not limited to people either, you could also create a Page for each class you teacher or other departments within your organization.
More information about creating a Facebook Page:
- How to: Create a Facebook Fan Page
- 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page
- How To Create and Promote Your Facebook Fan Page
Do Facebook Pages allow the page owner to see the profile of all followers/fans?
A frequent concern I read/hear is not just that my students can see my content, but that I can see THEIR content. I like the lack of personableness that could come with a teacher/classroom Page, but fear that the proverbial Appropriateness Barrier would still be crossed if teachers are put into sticky situations with reporting/not-reporting inappropriate content (party pictures, cyber-bullying, etc.)
Are you aware of any other classroom Pages? I like the idea but would like to see some working examples.
I’m almost positive that the page owner cannot see the profile of its fans, that would be a huge security issue. Unfortunately, my Ryan Collins page doesn’t have any fans that I’m not already friends with, but I checked another page that I admin and I cannot see any profile information of fans.
This is a big benefit of using a Page.
I found one page:
http://ryancollins.org/u/4m
I’ll have to look and see if I can find more. Euclid City Schools (http://www.euclidschools.org/) has a Facebook group, but one big advantage of a page over a group is that a page is public to everyone, it doesn’t require a Facebook account to view.
Great, good news then!
And seeing as I’m now at school trying to check out your example link, yes, I vote FB Pages should be unblocked by schools. Or can schools start by just unblocking certain (checked, educational) FB Pages? I’d fear that, “Now they let those kids play on that Facebook thing at school!” would quickly get around town. If our stance is firm: EDUCATION-RELATED CONTENT ONLY, our perception would be better off.