I have had a Twitter account for several years, mainly because I wanted to use Paper.li as a way to connect my families with news articles that might be of interest. I pulled together a feed culled mainly from respected news organizations in math, science, and art, signed up for Twitter…and ran into school board policy.

Until this year, we were not allowed to use social media in any form to communicate with families. (The current policy is available here.) Skype was even blocked in our district for a time. On one hand, this protects teachers’ privacy, and the school board’s legal pockets. [Full disclosure: I’m not on Facebook. My husband has an account that I use on occasion, but the account is mainly his. As a teacher who lives in the community I serve, staying off Facebook represented a small way to buffer my family from my work. So I get the arguments about privacy and data control.] On the other hand, blanket blackouts represent a missed professional opportunity to teach students about the world using the tools that they have available to them.

I look at the work done by Matt Gomez with kindergarten students where digital tools are explicitly incorporated into the classroom so that students understand both the permanence and the human impact that digital learning can have. I recognize that there will always be “mean girls,” but perhaps there might be fewer if we start earlier in helping students to understand “their” world is both bigger and smaller than it has ever been. Kids are on social media, whether we choose to acknowledge it in schools or not.

Later this fall, I am going to try an experiment with my students, born purely of Twitter-fueled happenstance. Among the organizations I followed on Twitter for my Paper.li feed was NASA. In September, NASA-JPL held a contest, randomly selecting followers for a backstage tour. In November, I will be heading behind the scenes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory–and they are going to let me livetweet the event for my students to follow along. The school is going to create an account for me to use so students and families can follow me on my adventure and ask questions along the way. I’m hoping that this will turn into a teachable moment about the power of social media to extend the world, person by person, as well as the responsibility one has when using social media.

How do you teach kids to use digital tools?