Should Schools Friend Facebook?

Is social networking a costly distraction for young students or a powerful, underexploited educational tool?

School has resumed for another year, and one of the hottest issues is the increasing use of Facebook in public schools. On Sept. 1, CBC-TV’s The National ran a story focusing on Grade 7 teacher Colin Kristoff and his successful campaign to bring Facebook into Catholic public schools in Regina, Sask. While it’s popular with most students, principals and teachers remain deeply divided on whether social networking sites have any place in today’s classrooms.

After years of blocking the popular site from schools, Canada’s largest public school boards have decided to embrace it instead. Public boards in Toronto, Vancouver, and Waterloo Region have relented and are permitting classroom access. Atlantic Canada’s biggest board, the Halifax Regional School Board, remains an outlier, blocking student and teacher access in its 137 schools. Every school in that system, along with many others, is “locked down,” even though students use social media virtually everywhere else these days.

School boards have been making such “lockdown” attempts since the days of MSN, MySpace, and other primitive predecessors to Facebook. But the Facebook invasion looks unstoppable. Today’s teens are living an online adolescence, many viewing schools as alien territory, hostile to the exciting possibilities of internet exploration. And even though Facebook’s own rules still prohibit use by those under age 13, the site is now regularly accessed by pre-teens.

If the use of Facebook cannot be stopped, it’s time to develop responsible use policies to eliminate or minimize potential abuses. Positive, proactive rules are urgently needed in schools to supplement outdated student discipline codes. After all, online bullying, posting inappropriate pictures, and privacy invasion are now far more serious threats than stealing locker combinations, rifling through school bags, and shoving in the halls.

Ontario’s Waterloo Region District Board was one of the first to crack on the issue of access to Facebook. Back in April 2010, the board went on record as encouraging the use of social media in the schools, with proper guidance. Assistant superintendent of learning services Peter Rubenschuh fronted the initiative. “We are looking at social media tools to support the learning agenda,” he told the Kitchener Waterloo Record. Starting this month, the board is allowing Facebook to be used in its schools for students aged 13 and older. It will be moderated, and it will be used for such things as discussing issues that come up in the curriculum, or offering extra help.

The idea for the change came about, oddly enough, as an outgrowth of a Waterloo Board character education project. After bringing 200 people together last school year, including teachers, administrators and students, Rubenschuh and his team discovered that Facebook could simply not be ignored.

“This is their world,” he stated, referring to today’s teens; providing access to the site helps, to some degree, to “empower them with a voice.” Furthermore, when it comes to character education, promoting “respect, kindness, and integrity” means engaging students where they live, in the digital world.

As today’s teens and children acquire most of their information via social media and use Facebook to socialize with friends, school boards adhering to rigid lockdown policies run the risk of being the “ostriches” of the new century. Blocking student access may soon begin to look like the actions of a “child protection agency” sheltering kids from real life.

Facing today’s information technology challenges head-on and thinking creatively are becoming imperative. What schools really need are new terms of engagement with “screenagers.” It’s time to develop clear guidelines for the effective use of social media. In the right hands, Web 2.0 can be a powerful tool, stimulating informed discussion as well as broadening and deepening student learning.

Dr. Paul W. Bennett is Director of Schoolhouse Consulting, Halifax, author of The Grammar School (2009), and online editor of EduBlog at www.schoolhouseconsulting.ca.