Digital Citizen – Facebook
Facebook’s recent success at reaching the 300 million users milestone prompted a very interesting and insightful conversation with a school principal.
Facebook and other social networking sites are for many, many administrators a bone of contention. Many look at it with a degree of fear and trepidation because of “potential” for inappropriate activity. This can be cyberbullying, bad publicity or just good old fashion time and resource wasting. There is a large element of lack of control too. So as a direct result Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and a host of other sites are banned/blocked etc.
This school, like many is actively encouraging the senior students to bring their own digital devices and connect them to the wireless
network – a facility called Senior WiFi has been made available. But with this proliferation of machines comes concerns and the conversation turned to “Should we block facebook”.
The answer was a resounding no – they could block it and other sites through the proxy server – but why. Instead the approach taken was this:
- Your laptops are your own property, you can bring them to school for educational use. This is a privilege
- Your use of them in class is for education.
- If you use them for other purposes in class you may have the privilege revoked
- at lunch, breaks or before and after school you use social networking sites that is fine as long as your use is appropriate
- If your use of technology is inappropriate there will be consequences.
This as a solution has transparency. It solves not only the social networking issues but actually address a wider range of issues to. Surfing hate/sex/porn/racist etc sites is inappropriate… Cyberbullying/flaming/outing etc are inappropriate. Students have to take ownership for their actions.
This is an excellent outcome. The students are free to make informed choices and therefore accept consequences of their actions. It is preparing them for a world beyond the school gates, where such actions – use of facebook etc – can have severe consequence. It brings out into the open student actions, rather than using proxy anonymising sites to connect, students can connect directly(and this can be traced). Student have to manage and take ownership for their internet usage, behaviours and quota.
All in all very positive.
September 19th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
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September 20th, 2009 at 12:43 am
On a recent school excursion to a country area, our students had difficulty getting coverage on their phones with mixed results. They appeared to have more success when accessing the Interneet and of course facebook. It was a graphic example of the current trend and practice among these young people. With mobile phone technology developing at such a rate, we are yet again faced with the dilemma of how to manage it in our schools. We have our computer network locked down to satisfy the powers that be but as many will have come to appreciate, that is of no use in managing what is brought into the school by way of mobile phones etc. We have absolutely no control over content and to some degree, usage of these devices. As it is, there is anecdotal evidence that many of the conventional phones are used to share highly inappropriate material and we are extremely limited in our powers to address this. So, with the advent of Internet capable phones, that issue just became a whole lot bigger and more complex.
I support the inclusion of technology in schoolls but we have some huge challenges working out just how to make it work for some common benefit and not allow it to further isolate students.
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September 20th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Following this with interest. I appreciate you sharing the steps you take at your school in these areas as it is very helpful to those of us just starting out. My immediate thought to take away from this post is that if you you have Facebook etc open it is easier to trace useage than if they are using proxy anonymising sites – which of course they will do if it is blocked. It seems so obvious when you put it like that!
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September 20th, 2009 at 10:40 am
[...] mark prompted a rattling engrossing and insightful conversation with a school. Original post: Digital Citizen – Facebook | Educational Origami Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: 300-million, abiding, and-insightful, gerard-butler, into-, [...]
September 29th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I think the approach that your school is taking is great. I am new to education and educational technology, so I have just recently encountered the problem of schools blocking social networking sites. While visiting a physics teacher at a local high school, the teacher and I started to discuss educational technology and its possible uses for his class. I just learned about the social bookmarking site, delicious.com, and thought it would be a great way for students to keep track of useful links (especially for research purposes) and be able to share them with each other. I wanted to show the teacher how it works, and as I tried to add his class website to my delicious.com bookmarks, I ran into the big restricted access notice. Since this was the first time running into this problem, I was just shocked and so disappointed. This is a respectable all-girl prep school with intelligent and responsible students, and it is also considered a laptop school (every student in the school has a laptop). I think that your school’s policy for social networking would be great for this school, but I wonder how it would work at larger public schools.
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October 23rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I was glad to read your post and happy with the policy at your school. I am a pre-service teacher, but also retired military. In school we have been taught that in this digital age we need to make use of the tools out there. Yet, when you go to many school systems they have blocked access to it due to the “fear factor”. Well, the correct response is not to block all these sites (some obviously need to be blocked), but to teach *appropriate time, manner, place* of these sites. If we’re not teaching them how to use the internet appropriately aren’t we failing them to begin with? I’m hoping that more and more school systems move to such a policy. In the meantime I am constantly discovering work-around solutions to bypass these blocks.
Oh, and if anyone has any doubts that students don’t already know how to get around these blocks – they’re fooling themselves. Students know and, in many cases, teach them to the teachers so teachers can check their Gmail accounts at school. Now THAT’S silly.
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