Schools: Take control or forfeit your profile

Who is controlling your school's online profile?In my presentation to educators I usually say:You need to take control of your online presence, because if you don't...someone else will!Do schools have someone looking after their online profile?Do we need to create a new position in the communication office?I just got done editing my school's wikipedia entry where someone had put false information on the site. It was brought to my attention today by a teacher who was told by a student about the edits made to the article.Funny enough as I'm writing this blog post I go back to the page to find more edits made that are false. I quickly go to the history page, see that the person editing the pages is logged in as user: shanghai12345, and quickly undo their edits again.I'm loving this! They make an edit I click on the history, click undo, write a quick summary of my edit and click Revert. The real information comes back.

Schools need to understand where students go to get information about their school.Schools need to understand that if you don't control the school's profile students will.How is your school represented on Facebook?How is your school represented on Wikipedia?How can your school leverage these places as communication avenues?How can your school leverage these social-networks for learning?If someone at your school isn't asking these questions...isn't actively creating and managing your school's online presence then the school is allowing students past/present/future to create it for them.If school's are not going to adopt and take these spaces seriously...then they will allow these social places to run the school's image. Someday I have a feeling that will ruin a school, an administrator, or a teacher. We are only at the beginning of the use of these tools. Take control now or forfeit your online profile to others!