Social Media Policy (SMP)

This section of the Centre for the Study of Teacher Education website was created as a resource for stakeholders involved in the development, updating, and study of social media policy within K-12 in British Columbia.

The resource was created because teachers today face regulation and restrictions in their use of social media. Some regulations and restrictions are self-imposed, as they seek to keep a clear boundary between their professional and private lives, while others come from provincial guidelines and school district policies regulating the use of social media. Quite often, these guidelines and policies are unclear and leave it up to teachers’ “best judgement” as to how to navigate this challenging area. In the absence of overarching policies, teachers are then open to the possibility of facing disciplinary action for using social media in a way that they may have considered acceptable while an authority deems the content or expression “inappropriate.”

This resource seeks to help in addressing this challenge in the hope that both current and future teachers can avoid the pitfalls surrounding their use of social media.