The International Schools Review Forum

So, I am putting together my wife and I's personal website for the recruiting section. I have four separate pages on mine;

1. Curriculum (an overview of what I'm teaching now and how I integrate / differentiate, what kinds of resources I'm using, etc)

2. A video page - a brief intro from me followed by a video I did of my class last year.

3. Extra curricular activities - photos / descriptions

4. Student success stories - I feel I did a particularly good job with one student last year and have come up with a page which goes through what I did to help the student and the positive outcomes. I have changed names, but have posted photos of the student.

My question is, how would potential employers feel about no. 4? The work I did with this is student is a point of pride for me, and I want to let employers know how that unfolded. For reasons I won't go into, the page needs photos. My wife is slightly concerned some employers might object to posting photos of a student (regardless of names being changes).

What do you think? My principal has no problem with me posting photos on my class website and it seems an increasing number of schools are using FaceBook and Twitter as a medium. The parents have no problem with it either.

Since the parents are okay with you posting the pictures, you could put some kind of disclaimer at the bottom of the page, such as "Pictures posted with permission by the parents of xxxxx". That's a simple way to head off some of the problems with #4.

Great idea to post the stories...bad idea to post photo of actual student. I cannot see any benefit to be gained with the photos and lots of pitfalls.

How are you going to post the success story about the kid without mentioning any problems/concerns about the student? I'm assuming they came from a position of needing help to one of achievement?

If other students saw that, couldn't that be embarrassing? My son gets individualized services and if one of his teachers posted that, even in the context of any improvement, I'd be pissed if even just his picture was included.

If one of our teaches did that in our district, at minimum their sense of responsibility would be questioned. If I was considering a teacher that did that, I would think twice.

Take the above advice and don't. Save it for any interview you have.

I agree with the others, there is no benefit to using the photo. What matters in this case is the narrative. This isn't a "before and after" scenario, the photo of the student adds nothing,a nd has a whole lot of potential problems and issues.

Do personalized websites/blogs for recruiting season really work in marketing yourself?

It depends on your teaching field. The bennifit of an online portfolio is: 1) It demonstrates your technical/computer ability and skills. 2) It allows you to present audio/video, and photos.
If you teach something in the fine or performing arts, like theater, art, music, etc then being able to have pictures of you and your students work is valuable, or video of productions and concerts is valuable and a number of schools will ask for it.
For most other teachers the only real material you can put online in a portfolio is a teaching demonstration, and many recruiters wont bother with it, and if they do usually only 5 minutes or less.
Really a recruiter is already accessing your online recruiting agency profile.