Written by: Janna Wing '12
Do I personally think teachers and students should be Facebook friends? No, but I’m not going to advocate for a law. I would simply advise that blurred boundaries are very risky, and that precautions are needed at any end of a student-teacher relationship online.
The number one technology that students use outside of school is social networking sites. This is the technology they’re going to as their one-stop shop for communication. It’s their email, their bulletin board, their online photo album; it’s where they do their writing.
An outburst of student-teacher relationships have produced crackdowns on social-networking sites. In many situations teachers have been acknowledged to have inappropriate relationships with students. With online trackers teachers have been disciplined, arrested and convicted of such behaviors with students. With all this in hand the government has stepped in to make a `Facebook Law’ to limit student-teacher interactions online. There are age restrictions on the online Facebook site, yet teenagers fail to abide by them. Parents that have intentions to try and protect their children from risky relationships with teachers online are all for this law. Parents also don’t realize it’s as easy to provide parental monitoring to control such activities.
It’s possible to have a very valuable Facebook page for students and teachers to have the capability to post homework and activities for viewing and discussing online. The students can easily access this from home, and it’s easily accessible for parents to also access the pages online as well.
Parents who strongly agree with this law don’t realize a simple fact , you take these teachers who prey on the students and block Facebook from them, it simply won’t make them stop, they are going to find a way to do it, whether its over Facebook or not. I view this as parents are giving up on parenting and would rather have the government do it for them, rather than parents stepping into their teenage lives and making sure there are no such activities going on.
So, Students and teachers can be Facebook friends it’s what they use the internet site for as their own responsibility and not the governments
