A small fish in a big pond of Fark

This is a post that I have been hesitant to write, because it seems SO self-serving, but enough people on my social networks have asked about the experience and it has gotten me thinking about some larger issues, so there you go. Interested in the article that got picked up by Fark.com? Read on. Just want the rant? skip to the reflection.

My first tweet about it: Wow...just wow.

How the Fark it happened:

The subject of the post has to do with the #theatershooting and some thoughts I had on digital citizenship. You can read it HERE. What I do not detail in the post is that I was on vacation in Northern Michigan at the time of writing, so at 11:00 PM or so (while playing TICKET TO RIDE), I posted (knowing from experience that this pretty much doomed the post to initial low numbers, but ah well).

I didn't look at my email until 7am (comics to be read and all). A friend of mine emailed that he was enthusiastic about the article and wanted to flag it on Fark.com. Here is the thing: I don't really know what happened next. I know that I received another communication that it was going up on the national boards about 2am, which means one or more people with the power to pull the trigger liked what was written or at least thought it worthy of discussion/flaming. :)

Since it had been up for about six hours, I logged in to see if i noticed any spike in numbers. I had more views at that moment than any other post...ever. In fact, it had already doubled my most popular post in the wee hours of the morning between 2am and 8am. *jawdrop*

It was a nice weekend. Numbers were off the scale. There were over a hundred comments on Fark.com and another handful on the post itself (which is rare for my blog). The comments were generally positive and a few reached the level of insightful, supportive, or interesting. There was a little thread degeneration and 2nd amendment grandstanding. There were also a number of people who thought that the post was tl;dr and verbose (in that it used words like verbose :) ) -- in other words, it was a good exercise in the discourse which has been my theme for the summer.

My fark-enthusiast friend told me that it was relatively well received... a lot more positively than most blogs/first time posts, so that was nice to hear. My in-laws began asking me what to do with this new found fame, and I did briefly entertain the idea of follow-ups or trying to create a fark-acceptable voice -- and I cringed internally. It took me a number of years to check my ego in order to be a better teacher, techie, and human being and I could see that door to the worst part of my personality opening a crack. (hence me not even wanting to write this reflection).

The Farking Aftermath (yes, now i'm just having fun)

• My blog almost tripled in numbers. There was a lot of secondary pick-up from other blogs and regeneration sites and analytics does a pretty good job of figuring which hits are spam (interestingly, older posts saw a much higher increase in comment spam than the popular one).
• I picked up a few followers on the blog and a few more followers on twitter.
• A lot of FB friends (and twitter colleagues) were excited to see the post on Fark, which was flattering and cool.
• Numbers on the blog are back to normal. The post that started it all is still the most popular one day-to-day except for the day of a new entry (it has replaced the both "defining BYOT/D" post and "Tweeting about Lord of the Flies" as my constant background noise entry).

Reflection:

It is kind of a thrill and an ego boost to see the kind of numbers that I assume some of the more famous bloggers get regularly (although I am not talking about uber-numbers...wow, its no wonder marketers need Klout or some equivalent to succeed).

But what i realized...(and maybe this is why I am writing this)

I think that we as educators in social media are at risk of falling into the same type of trap that I reference in the posting and to a greater extent in my breakdown of PLNs, confirmation bias and echo chambers in postings over this last summer. 

When I log into #edchat, or #byotchat, #flipclass or #pblchat, etc., I know that I am going to be chatting with hard working, innovative teachers who, for the most part, agree with me in theory if not in the details. We all believe in the importance of individualizing for students and feel that the culture of standardized testing is leading us down the wrong path. We believe that there is a wide gulf between the educators who care for kids, work with them day-to-day and try to instill a love of subject matter and life-long learning from the politicians, corporate education lobbyists and talking heads who seem to have the inside track to hearings on capital hill. 

When we discuss new ideas or ways to get started on a new method of learning, the conversations and links are both thrilling and overwhelming. But when we discuss the state of education, we all do the twitter equivalent of shaking our heads (literally, #smh) or making fun of the powers-that-be. I say this not to diminish the power of the former (it is the new professional development) or to discount the latter (we work in a world with far too little camaraderie and support). I say this because the conversation needs to be held beyond the walls of our various hashtag-PLNs.

We, the committed and engaged educators, have a responsibility to ourselves and our students to take these conversations into the marketplace of ideas. We need to share our perspective and worldview with non-educators. Because if enough people outside of our field begin to weigh-in on the ridiculousness that is being spouted in the name of an ill-conceived measure of progress, we might actually be able to change something.

This one is going around on Facebook right now. Ha!

My suggestions:

1. Be loud and in some cases obnoxious about what is going on in education. When someone brings up an educational idea in conversation, share with that person what the impact of that policy would be. We are the classroom teachers and our opinion matters. 
2. Refuse to be labeled as part of the status quo. My friend (and former debater) @JakeBonifield really drove this one home for me this week. If we allow ourselves to be labeled as defenders of the status quo then we face two problems. First, we lose the ability to share changes that we are making and to contribute to the discussion of problems that we actually face. Second, and more insidious, we get to be written off in the discourse of education as self-interested and protectionist. Look, is it silly to base teacher compensation on a test score that has been shown to have alternate causality well out of the teacher's control? absolutely. But if the only thing people hear from us is "merit pay is bad", then we become the whiners who can be ignored.
3. Begin with Parents and Students. As we have been working on our BYOT program and introducing our concept of digital citizenship to our community, I have been amazed at the acceptance and enthusiasm from parents, alums, and even students. When they hear that we have been looking at the problems of modern culture and its impact on education and working with technologists, experienced educators, and families to address those concerns they are thrilled. And they tell their friends. And the word spreads.
4. Continue the conversation in the general discourse. As we find our voices as reasonable advocates of change that will actually improve education, we need to message that not just on twitter but on newsgroups, sites, and other places where people gather to discuss. Refer interested people to the robust conversation that is taking place on the best educational blogs. (thx. to @dugitman of Downtown Comics for making the next step clear).

Sometime in the last five years and unbeknownst to us, we became the whipping boy for all that was at issue in education. The cultural shift happened fast and sudden and made it so that some of us were unable to respond with logic or reason or even a "seriously?" 

The recovery from that is going to be long and difficult because we, as educators, don't have the money or the influence to get to speak on Capital Hill like the representatives of the Gates Foundation. Change is going to take time because politicians are almost without exception two-faced on the issue: praising specific individual teachers but decrying faceless "bad educators" in the next soundbyte.

But we have our schools, our learning networks, and social media. We can use our voices within the populous to share our expert perspective. We can talk to others about positive changes that we are making and how we are measuring and demonstrating the impact of those changes on our students.

If enough of us do this, then we can begin to break into the channels of the common discourse. We can become the voices that must be heard. We can be invited to share our ideas and visions, our successes and our challenges. We can break through the money-influence barrier that separates us from the politicians who make our lives more difficult.

Heck, we might even get an article on Fark.com.

#bbw12 Day 2: Discovering You are the Red-headed Stepchild + keynote coverage and some not-quite-so-public info

So, this is the day that I was conflicted about with regards to Blackboard World, attending, applying to be an official Blogger (they liked the olive sauce post by the way -- and it was worth it! yummy!). Today was the big keynote with cool announcements and features that Blackboard wants shouted from the rooftops...and while I will be doing some shouting...even some positive shouting :), I want to put this in context:

We are not Blackboard Learn users. We use the newly acquired Blackboard Engage (formerly Edline). Jen and I were asked to come present our use of the LMS within our 1:1 BYOT system. We presented yesterday and it seemed successful...great audience and questions. We even got to make a short promo video for Blackboard, although without the Android w/ a surfboard, it will pale in comparison to the latest Jen&JD Show. We have also worked with some great people MoodleRooms (another Blackboard acquisition) and some great people from Blackboard as we put together the school's new technology plan.

We like Blackboard...but we also like the free and open internet.
We understand the need for an LMS and the potential it has to shape things...but we hate lock-in

...and so with that, my view from the blogger's table:

The keynote begins with an impressive look at the world of Blackboard. I smile when I see the 20,000+ schools under the Blackboard Engage umbrella -- we were a great acquisition for the company which had not been able to make real in-roads into the k-12 market. I am excited to hear how Engage will become a part of the Blackboard community as a whole.

The presentation kicks off with a "I am a digital native" animation that puts some of the youtube infographs to shame in terms of production quality. It  does reinforce the idea that #digitalnative is synonymous with #digitalcitizen and the back channel picked up on that and grumbled a little bit. It's interesting, because based on other RTs and reactions, some people were eating it up. I am not sure if this is due to conflicting idea, differing experiences, or an evolutionary opinion that develops over time.

They come out of the gate with the big announcement. It is called ProjectXP (visions of decades old operating systems cross anyone else's mind? maybe the guys at Moodlerooms who helped work on some of this are big Dungeons&Dragons fans). Its Goal: to integrate the learning communities of 25,000+ campuses, enabling them to share resources, ideas, and connections in a way that is integrated with the LMS...whichever LMS you are using. Now that is ambitious!

The first part of this is to be called xpLore and we got to see the demo from the keynote. Using a search bar, the user can search for keywords and then use some pretty powerful filtering to narrow down by grade, by course, by state or common core standards,  etc. until the right lesson shows up. If that lesson is in the form of a learning object (cute term) such as a quiz, interactive handout, worksheet or the like, it can be imported to the teacher's courseware with a few clicks (I think I counted three).

Attempting to Teach Digital Citizens about PLNs, Teaching the (non)Controversy part III

This was originally going to be a blog about how kids communicate based on my reflections of the last two weeks of the #BYOTchat (Thursdays 9pm...where all the cool educators hangout).

I was going to talk about the increase in students using twitter over facebook. How a huge factor in this seems to be the adoption of facebook by the students' parents. This was going to branch into a decision making matrix about distinguishing when we are trying to reach out to kids (in which case, be where they are) from when we are teaching kids to be attentive to their communications responsibilities (in which case, set the expectation and don't coddle). I would have concluded with some tangent about developing social media policies for schools that respects the privacy of teachers but encourages interaction with students.

This will not be that blog. Instead...

Teaching the (non)Controversy, Revisited

Note: this is part three, but can be read without the other two. Of course, if you want the whole picture...

In part one of Teaching the Controversy, I discussed the big picture idea of how our modern system with infowhelm and a dissolution of the forces that shape the Marketplace of Ideas is making it more difficult to determine truth and accurate information.

In part two, we analyzed how this impacts today's students and how creating assignments which embrace controversy might help us build the tools of critical analysis and discernment in students that a) they lack and b) desperately need.

I thought that would probably be the end of the discussion (for the time being).

[Interlude One]

One of the assignments I give in the last month of the #digcit class is a weekly analysis of a technology article. This analysis serves two functions: first, it allows students some exposure to current trends in technology that interests them. Second, students are challenged to identify a claim made by the article and analyze the evidence (or lack thereof) given to prove the claim.

.02% is really small

One of my students chose Twitter's response to the leaked twitter passwords picked up by a number of news agencies last week. In his summary, he challenged the claim that "it was not a big deal" because out of 60,000 leaked passwords, 20,000 were duplicates. He pointed out that twitter was concerned with 20-30,000 accounts when they should actually be worried about 40,000.

In the class discussion, we were able to use this example to point out a few things:

1. The source article that was cited was not very well written. It skipped a lot of information from the original Twitter talking points. (note: you would only know this if you did some digging).
2. In terms of significance, the difference between 20,000 accounts and 60,000 accounts when there are 140 million active users, is probably not enough to sway an opinion change one way or another.

At that point, another student asked why I was critical of the information from the article...enough so that I went digging for the full statement. The answer, surprised even me: "They [the writers on that particular site] are not the best journalists -- I only use that site for product reviews...so i just assumed something was off"

[End Interlude]

Think of these levels of information analysis nuance that have to be taught to understand this:

• Don't believe everything you read at face value -
  We teach that. Check
• Even if that source is credible by every measure you have been taught -
  Check? (said with hesitation)
• Understand that an expert in one sub-section of a topic might not be an expert in another -
  hmm. we don't teach that as much
• Evaluate all the facts from multiple sources from different points of view to determine the significance of the problem -- go beyond just the ability to explain the situation -
  That is getting really nit-picky. These are freshman. There are only so many hours in the day...

The New Authoritative Source: Personal Learning Network

At this point, I went into full-on Jesuit educator mode and asked the students to put away their phones and do some reflection (this is common practice, so they did it with a minimum amount of eye-rolling):

• What are the three sources of information that you rely on most?
• What are the next 5 sources of information that you use? (can you name eight sources of trusted information? my students struggled)
• What are the distinguishing characteristics that makes you put something or someone in your top 3, not your next 5?

After a few minutes we began to discuss. Some quick hit answers:
"I don't think that I have that many"
"I don't know why I trust them. I just do"
"I think it is because they say some things that I already know is true, so I believe other things"
"I like them"

At this juncture, I gave them the term "Personal Learning Network". For the purposes of the discussion, I am thinking of a PLN as any source that you believe prima facie (at first glance) unless proven otherwise -- A trusted person, agency, source.

One student volunteered to be our class case study. He explained that his most trusted source was trusted in large part because he felt they spoke about things that he felt strongly were true (similar worldview). He contrasted it with other competing sources that he felt were very biased. When pressed, he acknowledged that this bias was not scientifically determined, but a general feeling of unfairness that was confirmed by others.

If our most trusted sources are chosen in part, because they reinforce the ideas that we already have and we are likely to suspect data that comes from a source outside of our PLN, particularly if they have a different worldview, then how hard is it to change our minds about something we feel strongly about?

"It would be very difficult", our case-study student responded.
"They will just keep telling you things you want to hear."
"It would be impossible. How could you do it at all?"

It's Baaaack...

[Interlude Two]

Student 1: Is that why there are still people who believe the Earth is flat?

Teacher: Can your prove otherwise? I can only think of one way and I don't have an eclipse handy.

Student 2: It's what we were taught. There is something about the Coriolis effect.

Student 3: Well, most of us know it because we learned it in school. So teachers are part of our PLN?

Student 4: Do all teachers have to be a part of your PLN? As a group? Or do we pick and choose?

[End Interlude]

Human Development, Learning Networks, and Infowhelm

If you have read the previous two posts, I won't bore you by going into details. We had a robust discussion about how we live in a world that is set up to force their to be two sides to everything, even when it is really unnecessary, and how that becomes the source of fact for particular worldviews. From there:

The thoughts and feelings that help shape our
PLN may happen when we are very young

• We talked about how the sources we choose to trust come from thoughts and feelings that may be developed before we even know what research or bias is.
• We talked about distinguishing fact from opinion.
• We talked some more about distorting facts and pseudo-controversies.
• We talked about how most of the facts we know come to us second or third hand, from school, from our PLN, from Wikipedia.
• We talked about how boring and difficult Peer-Reviewed journals are to read, even if you can access them.

...and then the bell rang.

One of my students stalled as the others shuffled out the room, more thoughtful than usual on a Friday afternoon. "So what is the answer? How do we solve this problem?"

• I thought the answer could have something to do with an awareness of self - how we filter information and the blinders that we put on as part of human nature's way of dealing with the chaos of input.
• I thought the answer might lie partly in making the conscious choice to include people in our PLN whom we respected but with whom we often disagreed.
• I thought the answer definitely entailed developing new skills that included critical reading and rapid/regular crosschecking of facts.

"I don't know," I said, "but I think the topic is an important one, particularly as more and more information is thrown at you on a daily basis.

"You should teach this to the class next year"

Indeed. We all should.

The Vendor Corollary to Lord-of-the-Flies: an open letter to edtech companies on Twitter

Save Our Tweetups

When the head of the Indiana Department of Education and I agree completely on something, it is a special time. So when I heard him refer to twitter as an excellent source of professional development, I noted it as that rare convergence of educational worldviews.

I currently devote about 5 hours of my life (more for curation) each week to the low-impact professional development, personal learning networking, and link-and-learning available on Twitter. Hastag chats are near and dear to my geeky little heart: #byotchat, #edchat, #flipclass with a strong pull to #isedchat, #pblchat, and, if i ever figure out when they regularly converge I will add, #digcit and #edtech.

These are great places to be affirmed, to learn new techniques, to ask questions, and to pull tons of resources (which i routinely tag and then go back to read and add to @pearltrees -- although they need an ANDROID app in such a bad way. *hint*).

But, in a variation of what often happens in a capitalistic society, whenever two or more are gathered in the name of anything, someone is going to try to sell you something. And so, it is with a heavy heart but a great deal of optimism over the power of the human spirit that i offer this corollary to my Social Media Lord-of-the-Flies Rule: Student, left to their own devices in social media, will create their own norms of behavior.

The EdTech Vendor Corollary: 

Educational Technology Vendors, without guidelines of appropriate conduct, will attempt to hijack, dilute, and flood every professional development opportunity. (or something like that)

Follow the Trends:

This has happened in all sorts of social media spaces. I was following the trend with mommy-bloggers a couple of years ago as the social media mommy market exploded and the brands took notice. Over the course of time  I saw partisan lines develop over the affiliation with branded products, I saw an increasing amount of posts about that issue rather than about the things that made mommy-blogs popular, and i watched  new entrants to the medium fail to see value because it had been diluted with pitches, thinly veiled paid endorsements and little real content.

This happens with celebrities too. Fans like to follow the real lives of celebrities and call foul when a celeb who has been so good at interaction and personal sharing gives the account over to a professional media company. The cool and slick varnish of a marketing person sticks out like a sore digital thumb in the twittersphere. I have not investigated if there is a decline, but i have seen the backlash first hand.

My Proposed Rules of Conduct for #EdTech Vendors:

1. Keep Chat Times Generic Ad Free

It is to the advantage of an advertiser to post information when the most eyes are looking at it. This rules has been true since the Mad Men days. Thus it makes sense that Advertisers will want to set up their auto-ads to play when fifty or a hundred or a few hundred are looking rather than just a few.

But when i log into #edchat, it is with dread that i wait through the rush of generic ads from vendors large and small that often have absolutely NOTHING to do with the topic which has been voted and deliberated by educators who are a part of the community.

Solution: use the 5-10 minutes before the chat and after the chat. Many of us log in early and stick around afterward. Those who visit later scroll through. It's not as many eyes, but you will get more respect from those of us in a position to take advantage of your services.

Messaging Social Media to Parents: The Crossing the Digital Divide Presentation

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of parents about Social Media and Children's usage. There are a lot of big names out there willing to take funds for this purpose, but we have found that it there are a number of advantages to keeping it in-house. Beyond budgetary thoughts, this is a great way to help strengthen the partnership between parents and school faculty/administration about this digital world in which we spend so much time.

Based on this experience i wanted to share some of the findings and research to the blog, but i wanted to do it in a way that might be useful to other schools doing the same thing. You get to judge how useful these meandering thoughts are to you. Comments are always welcome. For I bit more orgnaization, I refer you to the  Lord of the Flies Rant. This is an important issue from which educational systems have for the most part abdicated their role.

My Word Things Have Changed
The last time I presented to the parent group at school was 2008. So like all good presenters, i went digging through my (at the time) PowerPoint folder and discovered the original presentation. Wow! Things have really changed.

• The "Social Network to watch" was this new-fangled thing called Twitter
• A huge recommendation was to keep the digital devices (I called it a computer) in public spaces in the home -- hard to do with these new-fangled phone thingys the kids have.
• I predicted that Social media would grow with you seeing more social media on news casts, websites, and billboards -- virtual as extension of real life.
  

The Presentation 
(note, I talk a lot more than is on the slides. Comment if you want follow-up posts)




The struggles in creating  these presentations are multiple - Some Advice in Development:

• There are real social media concerns, but it easy to fall into the scare-monger trap of talking about nothing but stranger danger. Back up your commentary with research. The Pew Internet and American Life Project's work with Teens is phenomenal and worthy of our support as educators.
• There is a real gap between parent and student comfort with technology and social networks. This discomfort leads some people to SHUT DOWN which is never a good option. Demonstrate the broad strokes of social networks as people ask about them (you will get the "what is twitter?" question, so let it happen naturally).
• There is no magic app or program or technique that will alleviate all of the fear or concern. Parenting in this day and age is tough and it is easy to see social media as the digital straw that will break our collective backs. But (see magic bullet slide below) we have two things going for us:
• Parents are the source of information that teenagers WANT to rely on for difficult situations
• Good parenting: open communication, clear expectations, reasonable boundries works for social media talks as well as it does for most other parenting situations.
• This stuff moves fast. Keep the information current and updated.
• Give examples. Give scenarios for parents to think through. 
• Leave lots of time open for questions -- They will have them and they are good!

Create a Forum to Keep the Information Flowing - 
The How to "Privacize" Facebook Part of the Blog

Parents were thrilled to hear that as a part of our required Freshman course on Digital Citizenship, we offered a "how to check your privacy settings on Facebook" lesson. What was interesting (but not surprising) is that they wanted the information as well. Be ready for a feedback forum. Since I gave my blog, here you go:

1. Watch the video below a couple of times. It is the "where to go"
2. Read each section carefully. If you are not sure what something is talking about (for example "tagging" is referring to a Facebook user with a link to their profile. You can tag pictures, articles, posts, etc.) then a) look it up or b) when in doubt, lock it down.
3. Think about who you want to see what. FRIENDS, FRIENDS OF FRIENDS, NETWORKS (less common anymore), and PUBLIC are all options in Facebook. 
4. Periodically Google yourself to see what is public.

Sources 
(Taken from the 2008 Presentation and Refreshed with links in the presentation):

·         http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/barnes/

·         http://Staysafe.org

·         A parent's guide to online safety: Ages and stages.

·         http://clubpenguin.com

·         http://www.electricbiscuit.com/SLS

·         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

·         http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/tech/tec14.shtm

·         http://medialiteracyinfo.blogspot.com/2007/05/forum-4-2nd-paper.html

·         http://www.netlingo.com/emailsh.cfm

·         http://onguardonline.gov/socialnetworking.html

·         http://www.utexas.edu/its/secure/articles/social_networking.php

Tweeting about Lord of the Flies: Social Media in Education

My name is JD...and I like social media.

I tweet...a lot. I post on Facebook; I'm one of the thirteen or so people on G+, and I agonized over giving up my foursquare account (until I did...whew. that was nice). I post pics and reviews to Yelp. I like social media.

So it is not surprising that my avocation for social media and my vocation for teaching were going to meet. What remains surprising to me is that there are so few teachers who are doing the same. Ok, to be honest, it is not surprising. Schools are disallowing it as a matter of policy, a number of technology admins are under the impression that it is disallowed under CIPA (it's not), and we are living in an age where politicians and lawyers are able to determine educational policy based on the potential of something to go wrong (and the lawsuits, besmirched reputations, and bad press that would ensue).

But educators and parents have a role in social media:

HAVE YOU READ LORD OF THE FLIES?
The @40ishoracle and I have been talking about the "Lord of the Flies" effect for a couple of years now. There is enough difference (lack of immediate facial feedback, lack of immediate physical harm, biochemical response differences between being alone and being in groups, psychological responses to the same....you get the idea) between communication through social media and live interaction that the normal rules of behavior do not cross over for teenagers. I could give you lots of examples but you can Google this or talk to any teenager to find this to be true.

At the point that the normal rules do not transfer, adults have two choices. 1. Either provide boundaries, rules, guidelines, etc. for the new medium or 2. Let kids set their own rules. I would argue that for the better part of a decade, adults have defaulted to the latter. Thus the online behavior that minors demonstrate in public (or semi-public) space which would be abhorrent in the real world is a variation of normal in the cyber-social sphere. Need to test this? Print out the transcripts of two students who are being mean to each other on social networks and have them read their comments out loud to each other across a table. As the social-network rhetoric is confronted in the context of real-world norms, the impact is embarrassing, tense, sometimes even filled with shame.

At the point that we decide to embrace option one (boundaries and rules, guidelines and examples) then normal educational practice takes over. What is the best way to teach? Draw upon the context of the student, give them hands-on experience, reflect on those experiences with experts and peers, and assess the new knowledge in the context of decisions the students will now make.

But we can't draw upon the context if we are unaware how students are actually behaving in social media.

But we can't give them formalized experiences when every social network is blocked at the school.

Ironically, e-rate federal guidelines now require schools to have a unit on cyber-bullying, but most schools block the forums and venues on which the cyber-bullying occurs. My child is taught to control her mouth (and hands and feet) by being corrected by adults, at home and in the classroom. Yet we are shocked when students, left on their own in Cyberland, perform actions which, while bad, we have never corrected -- isn't that what immaturity is all about?

ISN'T THIS ABOUT FORMING RELATIONSHIPS?
As we have been discussing for the last few blogs, the key to education, educational technology purchases and policies, and maybe life in general is forming relationships. It is in the context of the relationship that learning happens. It is in the context of the relationship change in behavior can occur.

I received a tweet last night from a student immediately after he had sent a typical-teen-venting tweet that said something along the lines of "i sometimes forget @jdferries reads these". It was an opportunity (a small one) to open the door of self-reflection and analyze behavior. It is in the context of the social media relationships that I have with students that we discuss online identity, good choices, and bad ones.

In a practical sense, the relationship that is enhanced by social media gives credibility and leverage to change real-world as well as cyber-world behavior for the better. It meets students where they are. It encourages them, through example, to apply the norms that we demonstrate to their online activity.

ARE THERE RISKS?
Yes. Adults have to be more cognizant of relationships with young people than they do with their peers. It's true in the hallways, the grocery stores, and online. Relational Power plays a huge factor in determining how this works. Being able to keep a personal life and a public life separate is a consideration (and, not to tip my hand, but ALL student-adult relationship are PUBLIC). Keeping records to protect yourself is a necessity in this day and age. Schools should develop policies along with parents and students and educators and administrators that take all of this into consideration.

WON'T THE LAWYERS SAY "NO"?
I don't have an answer to the lawyers beyond this: a lawyer is paid to help you make money (sue someone) or prevent you from losing money (suit proofing). If you ask the question, "Should a school do X?", the lawyer will likely answer in the negative. Nothing schools do make money (we generally don't sue), so the lawyer only advises you to avoid things that could be litigated -- Which, in America, is EVERYTHING.

To school administrators: Ask yourself if the above arguments make sense. Talk to your teachers. Talk to your students. Talk to your families. If, in the final analysis, there are valid educational and developmental reasons for teachers and students to use social media together, then the question to ask the lawyers is "Since we are going to do this, what advice do you have to best protect ourselves?" -- Everything else is just asking to be shot down.