Professional standards dictate that an adult should never be alone with a student in an isolated space (e.g., one student, one teacher together in a classroom with the door closed after school operating hours). This is true in online environments as well. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are structured to be closed environments, and as such the Dysart Unified School District discourages students and teachers from using them to communicate with one another. DUSD provides websites, blogs, and email for students and teachers to communicate and collaborate. If a student or teacher desires to use a social networking site to communicate and collaborate, DUSD recommends using the online service Ning to create a class social networking site. In such an environment, students and teachers are both protected by the monitoring of oversight of the Dysart Unified School District.

Teachers that feel that "mainstream sites" such as Facebook and Myspace will add educational value that can not be attained without such sites, should communicate their intentions with their building level administrator and the parents of their students. Teachers must remember that they should not assume that all students have access to the Internet or to social networking sites, and should not use these as the sole source of communication.

Guidelines for the use of social networking sites by professional staff:

  1. Do not accept students as friends on personal social networking sites. Decline any student-initiated friend requests.

  2. Do not initiate friendships with students

  3. Remember that people classified as “friends” have the ability to download and share your information with others. Post only what you want the world to see. Imagine your students, their parents, your administrator, visiting your site. It is not like posting something to your web site or blog and then realizing that a story or photo should be taken down. On a social networking site, basically once you post something it may be available, even after it is removed from the site.

  4. Do not discuss students or coworkers or publicly criticize school policies or personnel.

  5. Visit your profile’s security and privacy settings. At a minimum, educators should have all privacy settings set to “only friends”. “Friends of friends” and “Networks and Friends” open your content to a large group of unknown people. Your privacy and that of your family may be a risk.

Guidelines for the use of educational networking sites by professional staff:

  1. Let your administrator, fellow teachers and parents know about your educational network.
  2. When available, use school-supported networking tools.
  3. Do not say or do any thing that you would not say or do in as a teacher in the classroom. (Remember that all online communications are stored and can be monitored.)
  4. Have a clear statement of purpose and outcomes for the use of the networking tool.
  5. Establish a code of conduct for all network participants.
  6. Do not post images that include students without parental release forms on file.
  7. Pay close attention to the site's security settings and allow only approved participants access to the site.

Guidelines for all networking sites by professional staff:

  1. Do not use commentary deemed to be defamatory, obscene, proprietary, or libelous. Exercise caution with regards to exaggeration, colorful language, guesswork, obscenity, copyrighted materials, legal conclusions, and derogatory remarks or characterizations.
  2. Weigh whether a particular posting puts your effectiveness as a teacher at risk.
  3. Due to security risks, be cautious when installing the external applications that work with the social networking site. Examples of these sites are calendar programs and games.
  4. Run updated malware protection to avoid infections of spyware and adware that social networking sites might place on your computer.
  5. Be careful not to fall for phishing scams that arrive via email or on your wall, providing a link for you to click, leading to a fake login page.
  6.  If a staff member learns of information, on the social networking site, that falls under the mandatory reporting guidelines, they must report it as required by law.

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