Follow-up

After my last post, I thought I should follow up a bit.  I sent my last post to my principal, and it started a much needed discussion/debate.  To set-up his response, he's very hard line against social networking and mobile devices in school.  I've spoken with him at every opportunity about the need and benefit of using these resources in school, and we've developed an ongoing, fun argument about it.  I get where he's coming from, to a point, and he definitely has the best interests of his student body and their education in mind.  He has allowed students in my classes to use their mobile devices while they are in my classroom, and I see this as a compliment to my teaching ability since it is so far out of his comfort zone.

My principal quickly shot back at me last week that we should have a debate about it, and while he was confident that I would oversee the use of social networks adequately and teach students to use them appropriately, he couldn't say the same for every other teacher.  I understand this, and this led to the bigger problem behind the problem that leads to the outright ban of these sites:  network rights.  My side of the debate brought up the fact that Chemistry teachers frequently use hydrochloric acid in their classes, even though it can be very dangerous.  But, because those teachers are qualified to oversee its use, we allow it because it is in the best interests of our students' education.  The problem is that hydrochloric acid is really easy to keep in the chemical locker while network rights to access Facebook, Twitter, etc. isn't currently easy to keep locked up in the computer lab.  As our network stands now, they are either accessible from our entire network or none of our network.

Grumble, grumble, debate more, grumble, grumble.

However far away the prospect of having the ability to teach my students what they really need to know may be, at least I can keep it front and center by continuing to bring it up and keep it in the conversation.  And, we know what we need to look at as a school; who knows, maybe sometime soon on our network, it will be possible to make certain machines in our building have different filter restrictions than others.  Let's make it a priority to find a way to allow the use of these "volatile chemicals"while still being able to keep them in the "social network chemical locker."