Managing The Use Of Facebook At Schools
February 28th, 2011 | by Jen |For teachers, privacy is crucial. It helps them keep some distance from their students, which is vital in earning respect and keeping control.
But today’s teachers are finding it harder to keep their distance. While just spotting a teacher at the shops used to be the fodder of school-yard gossip, now, thanks to social media, teachers have to be extremely careful about their online footprints - their names will be Googled and their Facebook profile will be searched.
For each new arm of social media that opens up, so do new dilemmas for teachers, students and parents. Should teachers keep a Facebook page? Should they befriend their students? And if the answer is no, how can the positive aspects of social media be incorporated in the classroom?
Most teachers and schools have had to wise up quickly to cope with the rapid and massive uptake of Facebook and mobile technology in the past 10 years. The NSW Department of Education’s code of conduct says teachers must not invite students into their personal social-network site if it contains personal information or inappropriate content.
Teachers know the overwhelming majority of their students will use Facebook and so they must understand and use the privacy settings on the social-networking site to protect themselves.
Most Australian students, too, are banned from using social networking at school, with the Department of Education blocking access to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace on its network during school hours.
A 2009 report, Web 2.0 Site Blocking in Schools, funded by the federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, found 86 per cent of schools in Australia block Facebook, 57 per cent block YouTube and 14 per cent block Wikipedia.
Some educators say the social-media bans in schools are overkill and privacy fears have overshadowed the positive educational opportunities social media can offer students. They argue the best way for students and teachers not to fall victim to technology is to use it and understand so they can control it.
They also argue that while the ban has stopped students from wasting time, it has also blocked access to a proliferation of quality education tools on such sites.
The ban also fails, they say, to take into account the role social networking has had in real-world events - most recently the civil uprising in Egypt - and dismisses some of the rich and meaningful ways students use it, including to display grief and to rally for causes.
There is evidence that some teachers and schools are fighting the bans and pushing for them to be lifted. The report found that some teachers were circumventing blocking and filters by bringing files on a USB stick or setting blocked-site URLs as homework out of frustration at the inability to access quality educational resources these sites offer. The report concluded that Web 2.0 provided rich educational opportunities and significantly helped students boost their internet literacy.
It is known, too, that students also access social-networking sites and post to them during class time via mobile phones or by circumventing the network blocks.
The reason why bans are so widespread is that the debate about social networking and education tends to focus on incidents of misuse: teachers caught venting about students on private blogs or Facebook pages, students organising a Facebook hate page directed at their teacher or when inappropriate contact, or comments, pass between a teacher and student. These are serious incidents that require careful management.
The headmaster of The King’s School at Parramatta, Dr Tim Hawkes, sees social networking as a life skill and says bans can only fail students. ”Ineffective policy is to ban use; prohibition has never worked,” he says. ”We want to ensure that each student’s electronic footprint is one they are proud of. We do not want to become a society where inappropriate social relations become endemic.