The Miami-Dade School Board gave the green light at its Wednesday meeting to research and develop a social media use policy for the school district.
BY LAURA FIGUEROA
LFIGUEROA@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Posted on Wednesday, 02.15.12
With a growing number of teachers and students turning to the Internet for educational exchanges, the Miami-Dade School Board decided Wednesday to develop a policy for how such social media interaction should be handled.
On an 8-1 vote, board members approved a request by School Board member Raquel Regalado to direct school district administrators to further research and draft a policy for teachers and students to follow when communicating with each other through sites like Facebook and Twitter.
“There are so many different points of view on this,” Regalado said. “Some people believe there should be no connections, there should be connections, before we even have that discussion, we should be informed what the landscape looks like.”
School Board member Marta Perez voted against the request, saying that while she supported developing a policy, she was uncomfortable with Regalado’s proposal to potentially survey teachers about whether are connected to their students on social media.
Regalado responded that her proposal was not mean to be “a witch hunt in any form,” rather meant to collect data about the use of social media in the schools.
“I just want the information,” Regalado told board members. “I think it would be irresponsible of us to create a social media policy without fully knowing its use.”
United Teachers of Dade President Karen Aronowitz told the board she was concerned that a separate set of social media rules for teachers would over-regulate teachers, who already follow professional ethical guidelines.
“To suggest that there is something inherently wrong for our educators to use this technology to communicate with students and parents is to imply that they’re misusing their roles as professionals,” Aronowitz said.
Regalado emphasized that she does not oppose teachers and students interacting on social networks.
“There is a huge potential to use social media for learning,” Regalado said. “We have some schools on Twitter or that have Facebook pages, but there is no uniformity.”
Aside from Facebook and Twitter exchanges, a second component of the social media policy would look at easing restrictions on YouTube, which is blocked on district computers. Regalado said many teachers have lamented not being able to show students educational videos available on the website.
In other news from the meeting:
• Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced that the number of school-related delinquency reports was down 60 percent for the last six months. The district was commended for the decline, in a letter to Carvalho from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.
• Carvalho and Aronowitz signed off on a new health insurance deal that was approved by 62 percent of teachers and other employees who participated in an online vote Monday.