five minutes on teachers and social media i'm justin bath and i'm one of your professors here at the university of kentucky and i teach in the mic program in the spring i want to tell you a story because it's important to your future as a teacher the story involves facebook posts that look like this and this and this and images on facebook that look something like this now those are actual posts in an actual photo and the teachers that were involved in that were fired in fact if you do a quick google search for teacher facebook fired you'll see that there are lots of teachers around the country that have been fired or disciplined for things that they have done or said online so you're asking why and i get that but i think you know these things are public right even when you try to put facebook privacy settings on something it is public by nature the whole internet was built that way it was built to be public and not only that it was built to be permanent so both public and permanent everything that you post online most things function this way facebook does twitter does flickr wordpress youtube most things so for you instant infamy is just a click a blog post a tweet or a screenshot away now wait wait i hear you saying it right isn't there something out there that says i can say what i want whenever i want to isn't there like a constitution out there or like the first amendment kind of thing well yes there is and here is the legal analysis for the first amendment for teachers yeah it's probably a bit more complex than you thought fact it's probably so complex that you don't really know what it is right now and so if you happen to get something protected by the first amendment it's probably more blind luck than actually understanding that things are protected so but but wait a second the 21st century is here i hear you saying we're supposed to be preparing kids for it and we need teachers that are moving past educational models and into immersive mobile collaborative and social spaces well i could not agree more with you i could not agree more with you that's exactly the kinds of teachers that we need for our schools right now this is the administration we have in our schools right now though they make statements like this all the time ps please be innovative and we want you to be innovative but you have to be innovative within a system that asks certain things of you that likes teachers to be role models for kids so okay you want to be a teacher so you're willing to put up with some of this so now what well there's simple rules be responsible online don't say something online you wouldn't say to your mom or your boss directly so of course we need you to share without sharing there is no teaching we want you to share your best ideas we want you to share your passions those are good things and those are good things for learning and good things for the future of kids but i ask you what does this teach kids what about that is necessary for you to be a teacher this is a teacher this is an example of a teacher that got fired she got fired for this exact image by the way what is that teaching kids well that's what your school administrators are going to ask because we hold you to a higher standard and posts like this don't meet that higher standard now i hear you saying wait this is really hard this is not what i signed up for well too bad i say i love this slide we're asking you to be better than most people and why are we asking you to be better than most people because society is giving you the future we're putting our future in your hands and in exchange for that we need you to be better than just the average citizen out there and because of that we hold you as teachers to a higher standard we need you to be innovative we need you to push boundaries but ultimately we need you in the classroom if you can't keep the job you are no good to us we need you to share we want to hear what you have to say but because we hold you to that higher standard we need you to refrain from saying some things so please think about these things as you go throughout the year you'll hear more from me in the spring and we'll explore that complex legal nature of the first amendment but in the meantime please be responsible online and i'll see you in the spring