Teacher Social Media Policy

SpeakingChalk’s requirements for teacher behavior on social media.

When you join the SpeakingChalk community, you’re agreeing to follow our policies, including our community standards. Those expectations include thoughtful and professional communications with our community (colleagues, learners, parents, children), modeling appropriate behavior for our learners, and acting professionally.

This social contract – to treat your community with respect and grace – doesn’t just end when you take your “teacher” hat off and log out of your SpeakingChalk classes. Your contract continues with your use of social media, blogs, and other online forums, which we encourage you to participate in. They can provide terrific opportunities to share educational resources, market your classes, network, and share private and personal information and views.

While we certainly wouldn’t tell you either how to live your best life as an influencer or what Facebook groups to join, we do ask that you continue to use your best judgment and be aware that your audience may include your SpeakingChalk peers, community, and learners (many of whom are Google pros!).

Because our goal is to create and safeguard our trusted community, SpeakingChalk’s social media policy sets forth parameters, as well as specific examples of unacceptable online behavior. These inappropriate behaviors shouldn’t be news-worthy to you! So here are some golden rules to follow when you’re engaging in SpeakingChalk-affiliated groups and in any online forum:

· Keep our community dialogue safe and welcoming: Don’t provoke, bully or create unnecessary conflict--debate is only welcomed when it’s healthy and invited.

· Be respectful: Please don’t make derogatory or disrespectful comments about learners, teachers, parents, or SpeakingChalk staff--even if you don’t identify them by name.

· Be Kind: Don’t share content that contains or promotes hate speech, threats of violence, or endangerment of children.

· Follow our Privacy Policy: Don’t share any personally identifiable information or pictures about parents or learners--that includes descriptions of them, voices, names, conversations.

Additionally, if you are concerned about your privacy, be sure to configure privacy settings to reduce visibility on your personal pages. While this can help you keep your personal life separate, we also caution that anything shared online could ultimately end up in the public realm. Our unsolicited advice: continue to treat anything you share on social media as public!

If SpeakingChalk becomes aware of online behavior (whether on a SpeakingChalk-affiliated forum or a personal social media account) that violates this policy or our Community Standards, we may remove teachers from the platform. In addition, SpeakingChalk reserves the right to monitor and remove any content posted on a SpeakingChalk-affiliated forum for any reason.

If you have concerns about the online behavior of another community member, please make a report to connectatspeakingchalk@gmail.com. Please note that while SpeakingChalk will investigate and determine an appropriate course of action, we will not engage in discussions about the outcome nor discuss any other contexts in which we implement this policy.