How We Came to This Decision

Very recently, Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, made the decision to open Facebook to some of its staff members for instructional use. This is a step that many schools around the country are adopting, so we certainly don’t make any claims to being the first to take the leap. It came as a result of many hours of thought, research, and discussions with the administration of the school and the district.

Once the decision was made to open the site for the high school teachers, the next step was to determine how we would roll out the program. We wanted to give the teachers as much freedom as possible in implementing it, but at the same time, felt that we needed to take some responsibility for how it would be integrated into our instruction. We set up these guidelines to start:

· Teachers would create a professional account that would be separate from their personal account. The professional account would be recognizable by the campus initials as the first name and either the full name or the last name for the user’s last name. Ex. WHS Windsor or WHS DustinWindsor. Since Facebook allows the use of alternate names which appear in the profile, this was simple. It also gave us the ability to search on Facebook to find other staff members easily and quickly.
· All teachers would have to go through a district training session, regardless of their expertise with Facebook. This gave us the opportunity to lay out our guidelines, offer suggestions on how it could be implemented, and give us a signed record of their attendance at the training session.
· The only teachers who would have Facebook unblocked would be those who had completed the staff development session mentioned above. All others would continue to have Facebook blocked.
· This is not a mandatory program. Only teachers who want to use Facebook in their class would have to attend the training. Neither is it mandatory for students to use Facebook in their class, regardless of whether the teacher had an account or not.
· Before using Facebook in a class, the teacher would review Facebook privacy and account settings with the class.

The benefits of using Facebook in the classroom far outweighed our concerns, which is why we chose to open it in the first place. Some of the things we considered in making this decision are listed below:

· We decided we wanted to go to where the students are rather than creating something new and having them come to us. Facebook has millions of members, and some of the brightest educators in the world are a part of that membership. Why shouldn’t we go there to find them rather than hoping they will somehow find us and join our social network?
· A handful of teachers on our campus are already using Facebook to tutor students online. They do so on their own time and use this as an opportunity to pass on last minute information to their student and provide tutoring or homework help. AOL has used volunteer teachers to provide homework help online through chat rooms for over 10 years. Why not allow the students to seek help from their own teacher rather than a stranger?
· As a side benefit, this gives us the opportunity to speak with our students about online safety and privacy. As universities and potential employers check social networks to make admission or hiring decisions, we speak with our students about the dangers of posting pictures of that party on Saturday night or insensitive comments that can be viewed by everyone rather than just the few friends they think are looking. In this way, we offer our students a place to make a mistake without devastating consequences. This is the reason we require the teacher to spend time discussing privacy and account settings in Facebook before the teacher announces their online presence to the class.

This is all pretty dry. It’s my hope that in the future we will be posting specific activities that we have done using Facebook and lessons we’ve learned along the way. The hope is that more schools will make the decision to unblock Facebook and do the same so we can learn from you. I just know that this process requires a lot of consideration, so I wanted the first post to reflect our decision making process and how we came to this conclusion.