I think the reason some districts ban the use of social media while
others encourage its use comes down to a districts willingness to take
risks. It appears to me that sometimes
larger districts who are in the spotlight and have so much to lose if they make
a mis-step are much more hesitant to try new ideas and open themselves up for
criticism should they fail. I guess this
makes sense if you think about it. If a small, rural county makes a decision
and a few students mis-use it, the district can respond to those students and
rework their policy pretty quick. If a
district like Wake County makes an error and hundreds of kids exploit the
decision you now have a much bigger public perception problem for that
district. I also believe it comes down to trust and control. How much can we
trust out kids to make good decisions and how much control do we have over them
when they make bad decisions?
Hi Sue,
You make a fascinating distinction about how the size of the district and the number of impacted persons can influence district decisions. I also work for a large district. At one point in our one-to-one laptop initiative roll out, the concept was going to be, “students need to learn proper digital citizenship” but once the potential dangers were weighed and the possible lawsuits considered, a more conservative path was taken. It was also explained to me that ‘lots of districts and teachers all over the US’ permit their students to do things that students should not do (i.e. get online accounts for tech tools when they are not the proper age) but we are not going to go there’.
In a recent conversation with a student who was visiting the onsite building laptop engineer, I asked the student and the engineer why I see more males in his office than females. The engineer replied that his perception is that males are more curious and thus break, reconfigure, run into more issues, change settings, etc. more than females. The male student replied (week four of the roll out!), “Right. Lots of my friends are trying to hack the system.”