My school's social networking policy

I've shared this with a few people and thought I'd share it more widely. Two years ago my school came up with a social networking policy for faculty and staff. This gives the adults in our school clear guidance about what is expected of them. If you use it, please credit it back to The Hewitt School. We fully expect this policy to evolve as our online lives evolve. This just happens to be where it is right now. If you're looking for other policies Alex Ragone recently shared this link, which has quite a lot on it. We've been thinking about this more and more as our school just launched it's official Facebook fan page.

Policy on Social Networking

Faculty and staff members are only to interact online with students in school-sponsored "spaces." Interactions on CourseWeb, Hewitt e-mail, and other Hewitt-sponsored online spaces are appropriate, while interactions via commercial sites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc, are not. If a faculty or staff member is contacted by a student via non-Hewitt channels, the corresponding division head should be notified.

11 responses

What would the division head do?

Does the district also prohibit students from talking to teachers in the supermarket? Or are there district sponsored supermarkets where it is allowed?

Wouldn't it be better to teach the students (and staff, if the need it) what appropriate conversation and other social interaction is than to eventually push students out the door without them having any idea how to talk to adults anywhere other than school?

— Deven Black

arvind, do you anticipate a time when non-school-sponsored resources are used for the delivery of course material or to facilitate course interaction?

As I'm getting ready to revise our AUP for at least the coming year, I'm trying to anticipate (and react to) some class interactions taking place on Facebook pages and Edmodo, but what would realistic restrictions look like then? I can see not wanting teachers to "friend" students, but if the sites/groups/pages that contain the interaction are spotlighted and revisited by the community, would that help alleviate concerns about what happens in unsponsored spaces?

— Basil Kolani

The division head would act according to the situation. If it was small, they may advise the teacher to just talk to the student about school communication channels. If it was more awkward, the division head might talk to the student directly. Very situated in the context...

We're an independent school, not a district, but we used role-play to tease our real-world examples. For instance, if a student was eating at the same restaurant you were, would you have to leave? Most people thought no. If a student asked you to have dinner with them after school at a restaurant, would you do so? Most people thought no. If you see them in the supermarket, certainly, say hello. If you see them on Facebook, no big deal, you saw them, move on. Starting a dialog on Facebook, well, not so much in accordance with our understanding of boundaries.

That being said, if a teacher wanted to use Facebook because it was the best tool for the job...we'd then have that conversation with students and teachers. Any time there is a good tool available, we work with it. Example: we like our school's Facebook fan page and thought it important to have to reach families, students, alumnae, and prospective families.

Hmm, we use blogs, wiki's, an in-house social network, photographs, videos, e-mails, Moodle and more with our students. I'd say that we're showing them plenty of social media tools that work while communicating with adults. I'd also say that we show them when they're not the best choice tool for the job.

— arvind s grover

Basil, the reason we added the "school-sponsored space" is because we want to be able to use tools like Facebook and the like if we need to. If a group of people decide that they want to conduct some class activities in Facebook, then it becomes a school-sponsored space. Does that make sense? And if that happens, the normal acceptable use expectations apply. I actually think that our school's Facebook fan page is the first step in this direction. Our school Flickr is another good example of it.

arvind, that makes perfect sense. I guess I was getting hung up on school-sponsored meaning school-supplied, which is obviously not the case.

With that in mind, I love the language of your statement, but doesn't the next line kind of undo the intent? By explicitly naming Facebook and MySpace as examples of out-of-bounds sites, it could get confusing if one becomes a school-sponsored space.

On the other hand, the more vague the statement gets, the less teeth it has in practice...

I think it is confusing, but was written at a time where we wouldn't have considered those for school use. Even now we feel like we generally have better tools than Facebook for school use, but we do need a way of not confusing our audience.

Very interesting. I don't know of any schools that have verbalized a policy so explicitly. It definitely formalizes communication channels, which is probably in the best interest of everyone involved.

— Lynn Jacobs

I see more and more of this and I think that the lawyers are really getting the worst of us. I think we need to put the power back with the faculty and make a general policy that all student-faculty interactions should be governed by the highest standards of common-sense and decorum.

If a high-school student runs into me at a diner and asks me to join him or her, there isn't a problem. If he/she asks me to come back to his/her apartment to play video games, we're crossing a line. I know no shortage of faculty who (in the old days) corresponded via mail with students outside of school.

How is it possible that a student privately emailing me is OK (school-run system) but semi-publicly posting on my facebook wall is bad?

The biggest issue I see with Facebook is that the students are likely to post inappropriate material there which the faculty will see. Again, I'm not sure the difference of me reading about the underage drinking at the party last weekend or me hearing about it in school on Monday.

— John Hutzler

"How is it possible that a student privately emailing me is OK (school-run system) but semi-publicly posting on my facebook wall is bad?"

Is this leftover from when most/every school hosted their own email systems and could maintain control over every bit of it? With schools moving to Google Apps and Live Edu, does email now also become less of a school-owned thing? I certainly don't have as much control over the whole shebang as I did when we ran FirstClass, and I think it's changed my attitude towards email a little bit because I don't see it as completely "ours" anymore.

"The biggest issue I see with Facebook is that the students are likely to post inappropriate material there which the faculty will see. Again, I'm not sure the difference of me reading about the underage drinking at the party last weekend or me hearing about it in school on Monday."
This is a huge problem which falls under some legal guidelines. We are struggling with a social networking policy at our school.
In NYS, as an educational employee (public or private), you have reporting responsibilities for stuff that happens to them outside of school if you become aware of it in your role as teachers. Kids do a lot of stupid things on Facebook and with cell phone camera - posting pictures of these stupid things brings them into realm of responsibility. Granted in most case, you want to let the student know he/she is making a mistake, but what about those times it slips by - one kid is smiling with a joint in his hand - another is advertising the fact the she is cutting school - two kids are bullying another online - another is wearing clothes that cross a border on pornography. We each teach lots of kids. We can't pay attention to all of it.
Granted you can set things up to limit this if you are setting up the technology, but places like Facebook put the honus on every individual.
This is not including the hazards to parent relationships this can cause and the awkwardness this can lead to with your students. Sorry to be such a downer but even through the edges between private and public constantly blurring, we have to keep them in focus.

— A visitor

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— olivia302010

arvind’s posthaven

another piece of my social media puzzle

My school's social networking policy