This past Friday we had a guest speaker come into class by the name of Jessie Miller.  Jessie, who has a fascinating background with the Vancouver PD in both their bait car and sex crimes units, now runs his own company, Mediated Reality. He travels around the world educating people on how to safely, and not so safely, navigate the world of social media and the internet. What I as a future teacher took most from his talk was the fact that educators are professionals who face a great amount of responsibility (and pressure) when it comes to our presence on social media and the internet in general. We cannot afford to forget a very important point that Jessie made: every product on the internet has a bi-product. That “private” video you tagged some friends in and sent out on Instagram? Yeah, someone used a third party app to share it. Now it’s out for everyone to see. That Snapchat account you “deleted”? Yeah, that still exists…and Snapchat still has all your videos – even the ones you deleted because they weren’t up to par. As teachers, it is important for us to carefully monitor our networked connections. That is, we must be very aware of who we let in to our social networks (think of the story of the guy with the bad back who live-streamed his day of skiing…his insurance guy saw that, and he was fined $200,000 and charged with fraud). It’s so easy to contaminate our security of self because we neglect to maintain our social channels. The point is not to make sure you can get away with cheating or lying. The point is that, as teachers, people (parents, employers,etc) will inevitably be looking into our internet presence and social media accounts to suss us out. It only takes one look  Google search of “teacher fired social media” to become very acutely aware of what can go wrong in this line of work. So we must be mindful of what we put out on the internet, and of who we let into our online worlds. One initial step I have personally taken to protect myself is to set my Instagram account to ‘private’. I know this provides minimal protection, but at least now I have some control over who sees what I post. It is also important to stay informed. As teachers, we must understand the school expectations and policies of the employers surrounding social media, balance our personal lives with professional expectations, facilitate an open dialogue of usage with students and colleagues, understand social media culture, develop empathetic and ethical users, and understand the value of information. Taking it upon ourselves to stay informed on these issues is so important because, as Jessie Miller put it, the internet is like a bathroom with glass doors: the privacy found within is largely an illusion.