Comments on: School Facebook Pages

By: Anthony Lamb

Anthony Lamb — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:17:51 +0000

As the moderator for Ramblewood Middle School's FB page, I'd like to give some advice. We started our page as a "fan" page, which most businesses and schools do. The problem with this is that there is absolutely no way for you to prevent "fans" from commenting on what you post. For example, if I post a status that reminds students of a field trip money collection, they can comment anything on that post. I have had to "babysit" the site in order to delete any inappropriate comments. FB allows you, as a moderator of a "fan" page, to block anyone from "writing on your wall", but there is nothing to stop fans from commenting on your posts.

As a teacher, and school representative, that is a huge problem for me.

After speaking to my principal, we decided to take down our page and recreate it as a regular FB page. When you create it as a "person", you can block any and all communication on your page.

The above link does not exist anymore. If you'd like to check our new one out, you can go to http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id… or search Ramblewood Middle on FB. I'm happy to say that we have over 830 current students, alumni, and parents as "friends". Join us and check out what we're doing.

I'd obviously recommend to turn off the "chat" option and ignore any type of messages that may come to your inbox. If you have any other questions/comments, please let me know!

By: Brian Reich

Brian Reich — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:27:14 +0000

I manage both the website as well as the Facebook group for the technical school that I work for. What I am finding thus far is that students, graduates, and the community-at-large don't have a problem with Facebook and in fact have kept communication overwhelmingly positive and respectful–however Administration isn't comfortable with the "openness" of Facebook. They want the marketing capability of Facebook but the level of control and moderation that we have over our own website. Certain individuals go so far as to think that the poor grammar students have used is a reflection on us and should thus be deleted from out Facebook page.

In my opinion if you want control over every post that makes its way to your page, then you probably don't want it on Facebook.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:52:57 +0000

I think this is a very interesting topic.

For one, there are a lot of teens or tweens with facebook pages that shouldn't even have one. Facebook's policy is that you need to be 13 but many students are lying about their age to gain entry and facebook is the first one to say they will not 'change' your age later. They will delete your profile. My personal research has led to be believe that parents either don't know about this age restriction, don't understand the consequences of lying about it, or simply do not know the facebook page exists in the first place. Facebook offers a "form" which can be used to report age-violators. I strongly encourage authority figures to use this – which includes school district employees.

As an educator, I also take some issue to teachers befriending students, unless it is purely for educational purposes. Teacher standards have pretty clear guidelines about developing personal relationship with students – why should online be any different?

As public employees and employees responsible for the safety and welfare of kids, we should all be every careful about what we do online.

I recently sat in on a facebook/online safety seminar hosted by members of the local FBI bureau. They told the parent community that a frequent college application question today is "what will we discover about you when we look online?" I think this is very interesting.

The message we should be teaching and modeling is "you are what you facebook!"

By: erika dauber

erika dauber — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:51:52 +0000

I heard danah boyd speak on this very issue and her take was interesting. She said that, like any communications that pass between educators and their students at school, online communications should be handled with an open door policy. That is, if you were to talk with a student privately or address a classroom of students, you leave the door open and make sure you communicate your expectations to the students. I think the Facebook pages are no different. Communications should be out in the open and students should know that their public communications related to that school space are subject to any repercussions that would occur within the school walls. Overall, I give a thumbs up to Facebook pages for schools. Um, have you ever tried emailing a high school student???