***Teachers beware: The dark side of social networking***
Think only your friends can see your pictures on facebook? Think again. Harry Ess Belch, a school-based technology specialist at Union Mill elementary school in Clifton, VA, and writer of this article discusses the ways in which teachers can hold onto their jobs while still maintaining an active social networking life on the side. Many teachers are under the impression that what goes on in their own social networking life has no barring on their job. The incidents discussed in this article proved otherwise. Many teachers in fact have lost their jobs due to such simple postings of them holding alcoholic beverages to even more severe cases such as them posing in what they refer to as "sexually suggestive positions."
Harry decided to take matters into his own hands and stake out the laws for what is considered just an unjust, in these particular cases. "According to the U.S. Supreme Court, neither students nor teachers “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” This means that, teachers and students are to maintain their constitutional protections only within school grounds. "In the United States, every state has rules that govern teacher behavior outside the “schoolhouse gate,” but the legal protection offered to teachers often fails when the teacher decides to make his or her private life public through online social networking sites."
Teachers now have workshops to inform them in some type of training to learn about what is considered appropriate to post on a social network and what can cost them their job. The overall goal to make teachers aware that once they post something on the internet, regardless of private settings, they are setting themselves up for their "private" lives to become "public".