Pros and Cons of Using Social Media in Your School

THE Journal’s article Keeping It Clean by John K. Waters, provides excellent information about sites like Facebook and MySpace and their use in schools. Could someone put up a fake social media page and make it look like it is your school’s official page? Yes, says an administrator at Blaine High School in Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota, who adds that the person who did it has yet to be identified. The page seemed harmless at first, but then caused problems. Anoka-Hennepin decided that the best thing to do was to establish an official district page with individual pages for each school. The pages target parents, teachers, and administrators and are not pages for students to interact with school personnel or each other. In the Palo Alto Unified School District in California, students use social networking to learn about school events and to access teacher pages. Palo Alto installed LinkExtend, which includes KidSafe and ways to alert users about problem links. Some educators, like Matt Levinson (From Fear to Facebook: One School’s Journey) suggest that Facebook should follow Google’s example and provide a place that “teachers and students could use ... as a teaching and learning tool securely.” That’s what Edmodo does. It’s a free network that doesn’t require students to give private information. Teachers sign up for it and interaction is directed by teachers.