Facebook during the school day...

As a media specialist I increasingly see more and more students using Facebook during the day. It is a blocked site, however, there are ways around it using our district network and the school is pretty open to phone usage. I have the ability to monitor all the student carts on campus and have noticed that the teachers are allowing the kids to use Facebook during class and asking me, What's the big deal?" To me, IT IS A BIG DEAL! Aren't we liable as educators if something were to happen to a student due to the misuse of the application? I have screen shots on my desktop of some pretty inappropriate things happening during the school day. What do other districts do about this? Do any of you have information that I can add to a presentation I am getting together for my staff? I do not feel like the adults are educated in the ways of social media and the ramifications of it in the school setting. Keep in mind that it is NOT being used in an educational manner.

Any experience you have had would be appreciated.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Wylie on May 17, 2011 at 6:20pm

It is blocked in our district, and I am fine with that. I dont think that even if it is used in an educational sense, that they are really missing out on a whole lot without it. I mean, there are more controllable environments like Edmodo if you want to go down that road. Facebook is just too open for my liking. Whether we are liable or not I don't know, but I think you are certainly opening yourself up to a whole variety of potential problems if it is not being used in a more 'structured' way.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Smith on May 18, 2011 at 1:00pm

Your network and system admins would/should be concerned with the use of proxy tunnelers used to access facebook. They effectively bypass the firewall and any other security measures and will introduce malicious code, trojans, spyware etc. Continue to monitor use, make note of the URLs of the proxy tunnels and have your network admins blacklist those sites. In my experience, you can't really change peoples minds on things like this until something happens close to home. leave articles anonymously lying around the teachers longue about real cases of things like sexting, cyberbullying etc.