According to this article, the Virginia State Board of Education is considering guidelines restricting teachers interaction with students via social networks.
For the first time, the state Board of Education is set to make recommendations for how teachers and students should interact over social-networking sites. Next month, the board is scheduled to vote on the model policy, designed to prevent sexual misconduct and abuse. Local school boards could decide whether to adopt any of the guidelines.
I discussed this very thing with my nephew on Christmas Day. He happens to be a high school teacher (and coach) and while we were discussing Facebook, he mentioned that he, like the person in the article, declines “friend” requests from students. I can definitely see that point.
On the other hand, there are some legitimate uses of social networking between students and teachers, again, like the mass texts utilized by the teacher in the article. And I ran across this article which explores the use of Facebook’s fan pages. Some interesting stuff in the comments
So, dear readers, what do you think? Should there be restrictions on the use of social networking by teachers and students? Or is this more piling on, in that rules governing behavior are already in place?
Inquiring minds want to know 😉
(By the way – I have been unable to locate the proposed guidelines online so if anyone has a link to them, please share.)
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Many teachers realize that technology often is the key to locking a student’s interest. The challenge is, how?
Your nephew teacher has several options open to him. For instance, he can set up a Facebook account where he is identified as the teacher/coach, and encourage his students to communicate with him via that account. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and very practical, as his students are already on Facebook, so sharing information is quick and easily accessible. Your nephew’s personal account is not accessible to students–not without an invitation–and can be limited to friends and family. Many teachers use Facebook to answer student questions and provide mentoring.
Another tool is Wiffiti, which enables a teacher to receive, display, and answer student questions via text message. (http://wiffiti.com/)
Other teachers are using Twitter—sending tweets to students to remind them of key points from the day’s lesson or use it as a language arts tool.
Students today are technophiles–and teachers can use that obsession to grab their interest and encourage learning.
I think it should be avoided between teachers and students.
I fail to see how a tweet about something helps anything, and overuse/misuse is too likely.
Now, I’d love it if more teachers decided to communicate with parents that way, and vice versa. That’s the communication channel that needs improving.
I agree with Brian. Social networking between students and teachers just seems a little creepy to me.
Funny this came up as a teacher friend of mine gets friend requests from parents and would turn them down (She teaches 2nd grade) but in the new school she is at- the administration encourages her to “friend” parents and use FB for communication.
I think the rule of thumb for email should also apply to FB & Twitter- “If you wouldnt want it splashed as a headline in the newspaper- don’t put it an email”.
I am a Venture Crew Adviser, and I also decline friend requests from the scouts. However, we do have a Crew group on which we post Crew-related notices. If necessary, one can send messages to people who are not “friends”.
As the “teacher/coach/nephew” that was mentioned earlier, I just want to say that I communicate regularly with students on Facebook. They can email me and I can email them without us being Facebook “friends.” Many students who do not have computer access at home nor a working home phone can access Facebook from their smart phones. This is how they stay connected, therefore it is a viable means of communication.
My main problem is the fact that people want to regulate it. It’s as if there was no student-teacher misconduct before Facebook was invented. In many cases, the people who set up the laws are even further removed from the technology that they are attempting to regulate which can lead to many undesired consequences. Teachers are licensed professionals with degress, so we understand the consequences of our actions. We don’t need things like this regulated for us.
There was recently a news story on a teacher who used Twitter to interact with a large number of students at a time in a lecture hall. They could post questions to her as tweets in real time so she could see what questions were coming up as she talked. It seemed to encourage more interaction.
If it helps students learn, all the better!
Now if you look at the college level, out-of-the-classroom communication, like social networking sites, is very common. Universities today have pretty much their own websites where student-teachers communicate. They have bulletin boards, online chat, email messages, and class notes posted to a site to share information with all students. I can’t see why this model would not work in high schools.
Communication, in my opinion, is essential to learning.
I obviously applaud the Board of Education for looking at ways to prevent sexual misconduct or abuse. Here’s the thing, though: as much as we wring our hands about sexual predators and cyber-bullying and complain that we don’t really know what kids and teens are doing on the internet or whom they’re talking to, the solution isn’t less adult involvement in kids’ digital lives, its more. Chester the Molester isn’t going to try to friend Cindy Lou Hoo on MySpace if her parents, her home-room teacher and her school principal are all also friends with her on Facebook.
My better half is an educator (a LPC specializing in child development and school counseling) and has a natural and understandable aversion to friending students and parents on Facebook, lest they see the pictures her nitwit friends post of her drinking socially (which she regularly asks them not to do). But she’s also created and used MySpace pages on two occasions to monitor and intervene in online organized “cyber-bullying” between students. It’s a tool that should be used thoughtfully, not something that needs to be bureaucratically regulated or written-off and surrendered to people who actually do want to use it to hurt kids.
The need for regulating the behavior escapes me, as I think it’s already covered.