Tast 3a. My current and future networks!

At the moment I am currently using social networking sites daily such as Facebook and Twitter. When I used younger I used sites such as Bebo, myspace and msn but times change and everything is evolving. Sometimes, I look back on these older sites as my profile is still available. It is good to look at all the old photos that are stored on my profile because they bring back a lot of memories but, looking at things I have written on my pages makes me cringe haha.

My current networks on the internet are more personal than professional. I know people that have both personal and a professional profile and they keep their professional one on lock down so they do not have things on their that they would not want on show. Quite frequently I tag a photo of my friend on his professional profile, obviously by accident and minutes later I get a message saying something like, "Oi, div, wrong profile!"

I should probably make a professional one myself because my personal profile is very open and has photos from holidays and nights out, which if looked at by a professional do not benefit me. 

In the future I intend to use my online networking more and progress it into something more professional. When I have finished my personal training course I am going to make a page promoting myself as a personal trainer and post it to friends and ask them to share it with their friends. 

At the moment, the performing arts school I work for have their own pages and I am on the pages promoting the school. Eventually I would like to have my own school and be able to create a page promoting the school. Facebook pages are also free so it is a way of advertising for free and if you share your page with local friends who then share your page, it can get around the community for free very quickly.

If i go into teaching in schools, which is something I am thinking about strongly doing I would definitely change my profile to private, so that only my close friends can see. This is because it would be very unprofessional for me to befriend students, parents and other teaching and give them access to look at photos of me drunk and doing things they most likely wouldn't approve of. In fact, I would not accept friendships online with any students so that I avoid any situations. You hear a lot about how teachers have had conversation with students online about things they shouldn't or that a student has found out where a teacher is and done something. Some schools now have their own facebook pages and most teachers from the schools would be on the page or they would like it so it would be easy for someone to find them from looking at the schools page. Like anything these days, It's better to be safe than sorry, so anything precaution I would need to take to protect myself I would.