Social Media Etiquette

     Social Media certainly has it’s way of getting back to you. Sadly, for Justine Sacco, it ended her career. Just before she got on an 11 hour flight to South Africa she tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”. With only 170 followers, Justines tweet ended up going viral. The top trend of that day was #HasJustineLandedYet?.  It was truly a disgrace because she has South African family and she had embarrassed her own heritage. She was the Senior Director of Corporate Communications at IAC. You would think because she worked in the communications field she would know not to post something as inconsiderate as she wrote. This is just one example, of many, how social media could really hurt you. It could have easily been avoided if she was either told, before she was hired, about posting certain things to social media. I think any type of company holding a social media etiquette meeting  would definitely be beneficial, and maybe even save someones career. Sometimes people post things as a joke, but they don’t consider what it could actually lead to. Always remember to THINK before you post!

          Chapter 5 in the Connected Educator gives us some tools that will help support Connected Learning. It tells us one major tip that we should follow is to use the same username and password for all these sites so that you will never get any confused. Social bookmarking is a great start on how to stay organized. You use different categories in order to make different folders and know which one holds what. They suggest using a website called www.delicious.com. It is an easy way of bookmarking and

you can also use it to search like a google search, but it will search using your interest in mind. In order to build your PLN you can use resources such as: blogs, google reader, podcasts, microblogs, twitter, wikis, and many more. All of these will be most useful for yourselves and your classroom. The chapter also gives you many online tools for social networking. Some included: Ning, Classroom 2.0, TeacherTube, and Netvibes. All of these tools would be useful for both teachers and students. While you use all of these websites it is important to make sure you know how to manage your online reputation. In order to do this you need to make sure you track yourself and watch what you are posting. Be professional at all times and make sure you use the right type of websites to build good information of yourself on the web. As long as you are cautious you should be good to go!