However, the majority of my working life since I left school has been spent in youth work (although only in a voluntary capacity at the moment).

Before I ditched my facebook, bebo and MySpace accounts (short, uninteresting story) I did have ‘friends’ on each whom I first met as young people I worked with, although each is by now an adult. My last professional youth work role just predated my signup to these various services.

IM and SMS raised some of these questions for me, though. Accountability and appropriateness were the issues. Where IM is generally private, how to reconcile that with safe, sane, good practice? Likewise SMS: it’s difficult to maintain a visible accountability in 160 character bursts never seen by anyone else.

Yet in working with young people where I was, both IM and SMS were significant, effective forms of communication.

Over time my personal policy developed through saving logs of IM conversations to just not having them, and eventually only using SMS as a vector for announcements and the like.

I’m not sure how I would proceed with facebook et al. From the outside, your suggested policy seems pretty reasonable. I think it’s definitely necessary to have a stated policy in place.

Real names and findability are interesting questions for anyone with an online presence. They are definitely more immediate concerns for folks in certain professions, but self-censorship in the online world is a key skill that needs learned by everyone. How can that be modelled and taught to our young people? Several years ago, I took the deliberate decision to use my full, real name online. There are only a couple of identities I use in various fora and other venues (each with my real name in the profile), and knowledge of them and half an hour with Google can yield a lot of information about my lifestyle, hobbies and interests.

As I say, it was a deliberate decision, and one I have to be aware of every time I write a blog post or compose a tweet – not least because members of my family, my wife and members of my management committee all follow me on twitter and read my blog! Now, when I imagine young people with whom I have a professional relationship typing my name into Google, it becomes even more pressing. There are things I have considered writing about, or even mentioning in passing, online – and have then decided against doing so.

Ideally common sense would govern all of these communications. But, as you know, the main thing about common sense is… Therefore a stated policy becomes necessary, including from the point of view of institutional liability. What is probably more important is the sane and flexible application of that policy. Which, in my experience of institutions in general, is a much tougher task.

We ran a project to explore some of the challenges. The kids (year eventually created their own code of conduct and became moderators of their own Ning space.

http://www.clc-oldham.org.uk/case.php?id=5

“Staff should refrain from commenting on incidents that occur within the school directly.”

There are many, many teacher-bloggers out there who write about their experiences in school, including evaluations of their own lessons. How does this statement affect them? As a reader, these types of blogs are often the most useful to me, as they offer ideas for things that I can try in my own classrooms… with practical experience of someone who has already tried them.

I feel that the rules above go without saying, but unfortunatly do need saying.

On blogs, I feel that they should keep the school they are at annoymous, I would hate to think that a parent or child could read about themselves by doing a google search for example, but I feel that sometimes the only way to tell the truth is to tell it as it is and that includes the bad/negative aspects of the job.

And of course there is always one kid (or teacher) who will find a way round these rules.