Reply to 8th grade school project done on kik..dd does not have access to kik.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]But if a teacher assigns a group project and some of the class decides to handle communications via anonymous social networking sites that have, in other cases resulted in group bullying and suicide and murder, isn't that something the teacher and/or the school should be aware of so they can develop a policy?

Like, if a teacher were requiring kids to collect igneous rocks during their free time, and it turned out a bunch of kids were collecting them from active railroad tracks, you'd want to tell the teacher so that she could reassess the danger of the assignment she was giving or give instructions about what sources kids could use.

Maybe in this case it wasn't clear to the teacher that the kids would be using social networking to do the assignment?  In that case I could understand the position that the teacher shouldn't be involved at all.  Except that in this day it seems like whenever you ask tweens and teens to get together outside of class, it will probably involve social networking sites or texting.

Do most people really feel that schools shouldn't have policies on kids' use of these sites to do schoolwork?  I can understand just handling a one-off situation as a parent to get through the assignment, but do you think it's wrong, in the longer term, to ask teachers and schools to think about making policies on these sites?[/quote]

Schools can have all the policies they want, but it is up to kids to decide what they do on their own time. Suggesting that a teacher not do a project because it requires outside collaboration that kids could choose to use a method of communication not regulated by the school seems like a stretch. As a teacher, if parents told me of a situation like this, I can encourage students to use the school-provided tool, but I don't see them outside of my classroom and have no right to look at their personal devices. Parents, however, do.

As communicating outside our safety nets becomes increasingly easy, parents should keep a close watch on how their kids are connecting with others.[/quote]

The teacher who posted before you said she always tells students they must use their google accounts to collaborate.  And that seems great because it's not anonymous and can be monitored by parents who are interested in doing so.  Do you make a similar announcement to your students?  If not, why not?

Of course parents are the ones who must be responsible for the follow through, and I'm not saying you shouldn't assign a project just because kids might use anonymous social networking apps, but surely the best way of avoiding their use of such is for the teachers and school to have a policy against using such apps for school collaboration and for that policy to be communicated to both students and parents.  It seems like passing the buck to say all of this is on parents, when you all are the ones assigning the collaborative projects in the first place, which, if you do it with no guidelines, leaves teens and tweens to think they can do what they want absent close parental oversight (when parents may not even know you have assigned a project requiring collaboration and some teens may be sneakier than others about using media and technology).[/quote]

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