Since I have established my identity on Twitter as purely professional, I greatly rely on everyone I follow and who follows me to keep the same decorum. You’re that anyone at any given time could start a rant of profanity. I know that if I did that I would expect my number of followers to dramatically decrease due my lack of tact and professionalism.

We could turn on update protection and have to approve every person that wants to follow us before they actually are able to. I’m sure that would decrease the number of inappropriate followers. To me that’s more of a daunting task. I have gained almost 100 new followers in just the last week and I don’t really want to have to approve every single one because I know the majority should be professionals in the Ed. Tech world. I also feel like I have a pretty keen memory of who I’m following. So when one of the people I follow starts following me I get the email that tells me so and I delete it and think “Cool I’m glad they find my tweets as valuable as I find theirs.”

But if it’s a name I don’t recognize that I follow or someone that I’ve Retweeted recently, then that sends off enough of a red flag to check their bio and profile.

It seems like some people just let whoever follow them to get their number of followers higher than everyone else. I guess I’m just pretty strict about maintaining the “P” in PLN — Professional.

Luckily my followers list is short and sweet. Someday I may give up on the task of checking. I do a quick spot check every once in a while … not very often. I did a check this week because I requested that my UMKC students (one class of future teachers) explore and discover Twitter as a PLN. I wanted to remove X-rated followers.

However, when we discuss Twitter in class, I know this topic will come up which will lead to an interesting conversation. It’s a “teachable” moment to make users aware of and decide how much monitoring you plan to do. The benefits totally outweigh a those followers.

Certainly I know that students and parents at some point will click on my followers and, yes, I don’t really want them to be presented with inappropriate content whether they know I have control over it or not.

I think, though, that we are talking about taking on the task of monitoring our followers. Someone whose tweets are good and appropriate today might let loose a string of profanities next week or next month. Should I check them daily? weekly?

I think our focus should be on Julie’s statement, “They don’t understand that I didn’t ask that person to follow me. Many parents don’t understand that process”. It seems to me that educating the students and the parents is the better way to go than to try to monitor my followers.

I enjoy this discussion… I think it’s valuable and helps me think things through. Despite my words, it really does bother me about certain people following me, I’m just trying to come to terms with what to do about it!

It’s not as simple as just looking at their timeline to assess whether they are acceptable or not. And, once you have, say, 100, 500, or 1000 followers, the task is even more daunting!

With that being said, to leave this person on my followers would be ridiculous. Let’s face it, many parents are new users to using technology. They don’t understand that I didn’t ask that person to follow me. Many parents don’t understand that process. And, I don’t need any complications from that misunderstanding. It only takes one vocal parent to see that, understand it or not, report it and …. Twitter will then be blocked for the entire district.

Being proactive and knowing who is following you is just good Netiquette practice.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say I am posting inappropriate content on Twitter and I decide to start following you. My posts consist of foul language and I have a very inappropriate profile picture (I don’t need to go into detail here). Yes I am following you so I can see your updates but you are right you do not have to follow me.

So you don’t block me or report me for spam and you just allow me to continue following you but you don’t follow me back. Some time passes and one day a parent or an administrator looks at your Twitter page and then clicks on your list of followers to see who is following you. If it were me I wouldn’t want for someone else to see that I allow someone like that to even follow me regardless if I follow them or never have any kind of dialogue with them.

That’s why I keep close tabs on my list of followers. I receive an email every time I have a new follower. As soon as I can I go to my list of followers and check out the new ones. Quite often I can tell from their most recent post and certainly from their profile picture that it’s someone I don’t want to have any kind of access to my information.

Teachers need to be educated about the hazards just as much as students do. If it’s something they are going to be using professionally (especially during school time) then they need to be willing to protect themselves as much as they can.

This is something I feel very strongly about and I wanted to provide teachers information that would help keep themselves and their students safe online. I apologize if I was unclear. I appreciate your comment.

I’m unclear as to why you feel that you need to block people to avoid “spam” or “inappropriate postings”. My understanding of how twitter works is that the only postings that I will see are those from people that I follow. Simply following me doesn’t make me vulnerable to others’ postings unless I choose to follow them.

Is this not correct?

I have been using Twitter for over a year now and my school system is beginning to look at the efficacy of using Twitter in the school setting. I’m finding our efforts to harness this tool hampered, though, by misconceptions about the risks involved in having people ‘following’ you.

I’m only speaking of teachers using the tool professionally here. Students using twitter should protect their tweets, in my opinion, and be educated about the hazards.

My technical thoughts about keeping the computer safe were more geared towards parents/consumers wanting to know how to best keep their home computer safe while surfing the web. I was trying to not get too technical.

The parent should be the number one teacher. Should we as teachers extend this into our classrooms? Absolutely. I think districts should adopt specific internet safety curriculum to be infused across all disciplines.