Facebook in School

CC licensed by Gauldo on Flickr

This post is an extension of my thoughts after reading this post by James Levy at Northwestern University. James was talking about the benefits of using Facebook in school & providing some thoughts to counter the usual arguments against. Decided it would be useful to come up with my position on this. Seems to me to be divided into two areas, in school, & outside of school for both staff and students.

It’s worth pointing out at that at this stage Facebook (and all the others) are currently blocked by our LEA so there is no access, this is just a record of my thoughts on the issues. We also have no formal plans to change any of our restrictions yet, and if we did parents/LEA/etc would all be fully consulted.

In The Classroom:

Currently no access for anybody at all. The standard arguments against are about appropriate content and distractions. We counter inappropriate content through good eSafety lessons. If this is designed to keep students safe at home, why do we not apply the same model to our school connectivity? Distractions are harder to deal with. We can consider safe use of Facebook/etc as part of our eSafety training and are happy students know appropriate ways to use it when they are not working, but do we need to worry about it being distracting when they are?

One argument would say that the Internet in general is pretty distracting, selecting certain sites as too distracting is an impossible task so it must be about creating engaging content for a lesson & good classroom management. But, this is probably too simplistic. The answer, I think, is linked to all of our filtering choices. Wouldn’t it be great if anything could be available if you needed it to be? A filtering system that allows our staff to view anything online they like (with a warning before accessing anything that would be blocked by our LEA) would continue to protect staff but lift all the restrictions imposed for appropriate cases. We could then apply the same model to the classroom, link the filtering up to yeargroups, older students could access more than younger. Better still, link it to the timetable & staff could choose to open up particular sites for particular lessons. Link this up with a very careful system of monitoring/logging traffic and intelligently designed AUPs and I think we might be there.

Outside of School:

We know that the majority of our staff and student population have Facebook accounts, and are much more likely to use this site than visit the school website. It’s an argument I heard Ewan McIntosh make at the JISC conference in Edinburgh earlier in the year that really clicked with me. Every day our users have certain sites they will go to- Email, Facebook, Twitter, News (basically, some others but you get the idea…). By keeping the school in a careful little walled garden we’re setting ourselves up to compete with these for our users attention.

So, it would seem fairly obvious that we should be providing some form of content out there in these places. We already have RSS feeds for our news, and post updates to Twitter. At the simplest these are posts that direct users towards useful content on our own systems, but it could easily move into Facebook (etc) apps, maybe even displaying relevant data there?

Thinking directly about Facebook (which is really has the biggest appeal to the majority of our users) if we’re really going to start using it:

• Staff should be very clear on the implications regarding privacy on social networks. School policy is clear on this, but advice for use beyond what is expected is probably more important.
• A Wildern Facebook page could be used to promote events happening inside the school to our network. It could be much more than simple text updates, with photos and videos/etc. We could also allow users to submit content. This already exists for our community side as a small experiment, but we need to look more at how we promote it to local users. The main point for the school is we can use Facebook as a tool to pull users towards other content published on our site.
• Beyond here, what Facebook apps are available that we could encourage students to use? I really like the idea of making use of the popularity of games that allow users to compete as a school tool. These must already exist, lets look at what is already out there, work out a way to measure the benefit, and do something about it.
• What content would a student/parent/etc find useful to see there? Is logging into a school site the best place to find out your child attendance/marks or would it be better if it came to you? We’ve talked before about things like iPhone apps for this purpose, but could we present it on the places where we know are users are?

So… It sounds like all of this is logical thinking, and there’s definite potential for future uses. We go back, we look at current policy, talk to the students and decide if it’s time to do something about it.