As I mentioned yesterday, maintaining a Facebook fan page for your school or classroom can be a good way to keep parents informed of upcoming events. When you create a Facebook fan page for your school or classroom there are some default settings that you will want to change in order to keep the page as school-friendly as possible. Those five changes are outlined below. You can make all of these changes from the general settings panel of your Facebook page.

1. Profanity filter. This one is self-explanatory. You’ll want to turn it on.

2. Visitor posts. This setting enables you to decide if you want visitors to be able to write posts on your page’s wall. I have this option turned off because I don’t want to worry about parents or students posting things that they shouldn’t share publicly and or airing a grievance in public. I also don’t want to worry about having to manually filter spam from the wall.

3. Messages. I turn off the option for people to send private messages through the Facebook page. I turn it off because I want parents and students to use my school email address for questions. I do that just in case there ever needs to be an archive of a message or series of messages. The school can archive email, your Facebook page cannot.

4. Tagging ability. I set this so that only page administrators can tag the page in posts. It gives me a little more control over where page appears.

5. Expiring posts. Turn on this option to set expiration dates for posts. This is handy because you might be posting information that has a limited shelf life. For example, you probably don’t need a reminder about an open house night to continue to appear three weeks after the event.

This topic and many like it will be covered in depth in the latest section of Blogs & Social Media for Teachers and School Leaders. Click here to learn how to earn CEUs or graduate credit for the course.