Do you accept your students friend request? Often a easy question for some of us and not so easy for others. My advice for new advisors has always been “accept your students’ friend request after they have moved on, graduated, or transferred”.
A week ago, I started using my professional Facebook page, separate from my personal one, so that I could have access to my student government’s Facebook site. I also wanted to try out what it would be like having my current students as friends on Facebook.
So far, here is what I have learned:
-If you accept one student’s request, you kind of have to accept all of them.
-You have to watch how much you read into what they post.
-Try to focus on the status updates that are related to student government, clubs, and student life.
-Be careful how much you feel responsible for what you do see on Facebook. As I can tell, it is not part of our job to keep track of our students behavior on Facebook. The only time I see it relevant is when the behavior or comment is about something or someone in student government, or club, and it can effect the team dynamic.
-Don’t expect your students or make it a rule they have to be friends with everyone in student government on their personal Facebook page. In the working world, we are not expected to have all our co-workers as friends on our Facebook page.