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More and more school districts are passing policies that forbid teachers from interacting with their students via social networking web sites.  We have written about this before, but the movement seems to be gaining traction.  This is a slippery slope and a challenging issue for all involved.

A policy recently adopted by the Elmbrook School District (Brookfield, WI) bans all communication between students and staff on social networking web sites and instant messaging applications.  What’s interesting about this district’s approach, is that according to reports, the original version of the proposed policy would have “banned district staff from using text messaging, instant messaging and social networking altogether, even personally while off the clock.”  Are you kidding me?  I suppose the next action the Board will take is to pass is a policy forbidding teachers to listen to that “rock and roll” music?!?

Personally I think this kind of a policy is ridiculous.  Adolescents hang out in these environments and increasingly so do many adults (especially younger adults).  This is akin to saying that teachers aren’t allowed to talk to students they see in the mall or elsewhere in the community.  Are they just supposed to ignore them?  Why stifle the development of a positive relationship between a teacher and a student?  I think this is particularly true among older students, as the teacher begins to transform into more of a mentor than a superior.  What happens when the students graduate? Can they communicate with alums?  What if their own children are in their school?

Adults need to recognize that this is the way youth communicate these days.  They don’t pick up the phone and call.  They don’t really even email that much anymore.  They text and they message using Facebook and MySpace.  They increasingly Twitter.  If adults want to talk to kids, this is how they are going to have to do it.  It can open up lines of communication previously not available.

I know of many teachers who utilize social networking sites in a positive way to interact with their students.  For example, they post student art and creative writing or interesting articles or books that relate to topics discussed in the classroom.  Why punish them for the inappropriate actions of a select few?   Instead of banning their use, why not focus on teaching both staff and students how to use them responsibly?  Both need to recognize the boundaries and keep the discussion/interaction professional.

I could be way off base on this, and am certainly open to your thoughts.  Is this another example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater or are there genuine concerns here that are impossible to deal with using other methods?

One of our good friends and fellow Internet Safety advocates Anne Collier (co-author of MySpace Unraveled) recently did a presentation on Second Life.  By that, I don’t mean the topic was Second Life (an online virtual reality world in which people interact with each other via avatars), but she, through her avatar, gave a presentation about “Internet Safety 2.0″ in that virtual world.  It is fascinating stuff and she did a really good job.  I encourage you to check it out if you want a no-nonsense primer on the real dangers that adolescents face while online.  You can check out more of Anne’s great work on her blog.

One of the questions we field sometimes involves how private schools differ from public schools in their response to instances of cyberbullying and student misuse of technology.  A case from a private Michigan college illustrates the general distinction that we’ve seen.  In this situation, a 19-year-old male was placed on six-month probation after being accused of posting a crude sexual message on Facebook about his ex-girlfriend.  This punishment will force him to wait a year to continue his education at the same institution.  Largely speaking, private schools can exercise much discretion in these cases, allowing them to enact a penalty that may seem unreasonable and without complete merit (in this situation, the school authorities do not have incontrovertible evidence that the accused actually committed the act – he claims that his Facebook account password was stolen and exploited towards this end).   It is interesting that college administrators referenced integrity and values when providing some reasoning behind the sanction.  When we have worked with private schools (and colleges), reference is often made to a general honor code to which students informally or formally agree – and offline or online peer harassment is clearly a violation to this honor code and therefore warrants some measure of discipline.  I believe this is the best way to go.  I’m going to generalize a bit here, but we’ve found that sometimes in public schools students thumb their noses at the rules and it is often perceived as “cool” to break them.  In private schools, however, there tends to be a larger shared perception among the student body that the honor code is something to be respected, and it is definitely “not cool” to transgress it.  Not cool at all.   I like that.  I wish we had better success promoting such a worldview in the public school system.

One of my colleagues, Forrest Collier, over at InternetSafety.com, has just released a sweet new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that helps parents protect their children from objectionable and problematic content on their mobile device.  The program is called “Safe Eyes Mobile” and works just like the built-in iPhone browser with pinch and tap zoom, bookmarks, built-in Google search and multiple pages, and has no noticeable effect on iPhone performance.  It is the first browser application to control iPhone content, and checks requested web sites against a massive blacklist of potentially objectionable web addresses that is updated on a daily basis.  As you might imagine, it prevents iPhone and iPod Touch access to pages in the pornography, nudity, sex and tasteless/gross categories by default…and parents can configure the software to filter sites in 31 other categories.  What is also cool is that parents can force the Safe Eyes browser to be the only one usable for surfing the Web by disabling the Apple Safari browser and the installation of any others.  My concern was that the proprietary browser would, for lack of a better word, suck.  But it doesn’t – it has bookmarking capabilities, tabbed browsing, and pan and zoom features – much like Safari.  It is also pretty neat that Safe Eyes Mobile filtering works on both the AT&T cellular network and individual Wi-Fi networks to which the iPhone automatically connects when in range.  You can see a demo here and determine if it’s worth the purchase.  I personally like what it does, and think it is very useful for parents to install on the iPhones of their younger kids.

As you may know, Facebook recently altered its Terms of Service, essentially stating that they own all of the content that you (the user) upload to their site.  This includes content that you’ve uploaded but then later removed, and your content after you have chosen to delete your account.  The Terms of Service in other popular social networking and interactive Web 2.0 sites tend to indicate that you still own your content when you upload/post/share in their environment.  Today, Facebook has decided to go back to its original Terms of Service while they wrestle with some of the issues and outcry that have resulted from their intended change.  This reversal is a good thing.  I think we have to remember that Facebook is a private entity intent on making a profit (somehow!) in the months and years to come.  While we all use the site and benefit from the ability to have a virtual representation of ourselves online to connect with others, there may come a time when we must pay a cost for that benefit.  This cost may leave us without full charge of the information we have chosen to share (or have shared) with others – and this might come around to keep us from an opportunity, get us in trouble, or otherwise bring us embarrassment or harm.  Sometimes I think that with all of the privacy settings we modify and adjust for our text content, pictures, and videos (and Facebook has so many settings!), we are lured into a false sense of security related to what we truly control. I would love to hear your thoughts on this, especially if you use Facebook frequently….