My concern, focusing on cyberbullying, is that due to lack of effective
professional and curriculum development, some teachers may think that
letting students go to commercial blogging sites and post material is
perfectly okay. Art was absolutely right -- this raises significant
liability concerns for schools (please note the JD after my name, something
I rarely point out but in this case am).

An online colleague of mine, who had a had the horrible experience of having
to deal with the aftermath of a middle school student who committed suicide
in the face of cyberbullying (other students were encouraging him to do it)
has been trying to deal with the blogging issue at her school. She asked the
IT department to close down school access to MySpace, Xanga, and
LiveJournal, and the like. There was a major cry of dissent from teachers.

She is now trying to sort out why what the IT department did is upsetting
the teachers. Were they just letting kids write in their blogs on these
sites and thinking it was "educational?" Or did the IT folks cut off access
to some valuable learning activities? She can't tell. And the fact that the
IT department is not at all open about how it is managing Internet use (they
refuse to tell her what filtering program they are using) is part of the
problem.

I trust folks like Mark and Art to know how to do student blogging right.
But I have lots of concerns that there may be many teachers who are letting
students write in their blogs on commercial web sites as part of Internet
"recess" -- which is how students are using the Internet in schools where
there has been insufficient professional and curriculum development.

Nancy


--
Nancy Willard, M.S., J.D.
Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
http://cyberbully.org
http://csriu.org
nwillard@...