This is a very timely topic for me right now. One of my reading teachers has been using Shelfari in her reading class. Students had to create accounts and profiles and join the group she set up. Students have a "shelf" on which they put books they have read and are going to read. They can send messages to each other and to the teacher. Also, once they have read the book, they write a review on it. It has been going well until last week. Several of the students have set up or joined other groups besides the teacher's. My media clerk has a son in the class, and like a responsible parent, she checks his Shelfari account often. She began noticing a strange person in several of the groups. We did a little digging and this person is a high school student (our kids are middle school) who apparently likes to cut himself and talk about it on the internet. After we started checking up on some of the other students in the class, we realized that they are joining all kinds of random groups. We really have no control over which ones they join and who they contact. We can tell them to only join the school's group and only talk to kids they know, but it is really up to them and the parents to be responsible. It's understandable that this is why filters are in place and some systems don't allow access to anything like this, but that is really to harsh. The kids are actually enjoying this. They want to put books on their shelf and write reviews. For once they are actually excited to be planning what they are going to read next!
What we ended up doing was to send a note home in the classroom newsletter that students should only be in the school's group and should only be talking with kids that they know. We also had a very serious chat with the students and some of them were told to remove people from their groups.
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Your above example is one of the reasons why social networking worries me. However, the same example is precisely why the concept can work positively in the schools. To think that this teacher got middle schoolers excited about not only reading books, but sharing those experiences with classmates! The situation was handled very well, great job! As unfortunate as the experience was, you seemed to have utilized it perfectly as a teaching opportunity to make students aware of potential problems with networking outside the parameters (the class) established. Great lesson learned, and I hope they all benefit from it. I like that you all did not end the social networking experience in the classroom setting but instead taught responsibility, as is part of the ever-growing jobs of the media specialist!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very good example of a great idea not always working out so great in practice. I think it is great to have students enjoying reading and talking to each other about their reading. However, I believe this is one reason why schools do not want to bother with social networking. I know that as a teahcer, I have some student's whose parents would never let them get on that site again if they knew there was a high school boy talking about cutting on there. I do think you handled it correctly with informing the parents, but now what happens if the parents want their students off the site? It is important for teachers to have a back up plan for students who are not allowed to get on these social networking sites.
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