Should schools allow teachers to use outside technology tools?

Miguel Guhlin invited me to be a guest blogger on the TechLearning blog. A couple of days ago I submitted my first post – I will be blogging for TechLearning the third Wednesday of every month. Below is an excerpt and a link to the full post. Thanks for the invite, Miguel!

Should schools allow teachers to use outside technology tools?

I’d like to kick off my guest blogging by raising again an issue I once blogged about long ago. Many educational technology advocates have been blogging about the need to enable teacher and student use of Web 2.0 tools – for example, see these recent posts by Wesley Fryer, David Warlick, Susan Brooks-Young, and Jeff Utecht. While I agree with them, I also want to highlight the essential conundrum that school administrators face: there are rarely ways in which school organizations can effectively monitor the use of many of these tools.

As I said in my long-ago post…

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Schools and districts are required, both legally and professionallyn/ ethically / morally, to monitor employee and student use ofntechnology tools when those tools are used for professional orninstructional purposes. School organizations that don’t must face thenlegal and public relations ramifications of ignoring potential employeen/ student abuse of digital technologies. No school system wants to bensued and/or highlighted in the news because it wasn’t effectivelynsafeguarding against sexual harassment, cyberbullying, dissemination ofninappropriate content (e.g., pornography), etc. via electronicncommunication channels or online environments.

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Some schools and districts are providing rich sets of tools fornteachers and students to use for classroom purposes. These toolsninclude e-mail accounts, network folders, web pages, parent portals,nonline chat, online threaded discussion areas, online whiteboards,nonline calendars, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, podcasts, and othernsimilar tools. No district, however, is making all of these toolsnavailable to all teachers and, indeed, probably never can. Thenincredible (and burgeoning) diversity of available tools is simply toonmuch for school systems to keep up with, more or less provide.

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Many enterprising teachers thus are using (or would like to use)ntools provided by entities outside the school organization (such as NiceNet, Yahoo! Groups, Blogger, pbwiki, Flickr, and SchoolNotes)nto enhance the classroom experience. These tools typically are notnhosted by the school system, however, and there is no ability fornadministrators to effectively exercise oversight over teachers’ andnstudents’ appropriate use of these tools. In many instances, schoolnleaders may not even know such tools are being used.

So administrators are essentially in a bind. If they don’t allownusage of these tools, they become fodder for bloggers and otherneducational technology advocates because they’re failing to tap intonthe pedagogical potential of these creative technologies and ignoringnthe future needs of students and society. If they do allow usage ofnthese tools, they run the very real and likely risk of inappropriatenusage, including usage that may incur legal liability and significantnfinancial costs for the school organization and the taxpayers that itnserves. I think it is important that we not downplay schools’nobligations in this area. Cyberbullying, sexual harassment, and otherninappropriate uses of technology are real and frequent occurrences bynboth students and employees. Schools cannot abdicate their legal andnmoral responsibility to monitor appropriate usage of technology tools.

As an educator, I desperately want to allow students and teachers tonuse these wonderful new tools that are external to the schoolnorganization. As an attorney, I’m struggling to figure out how to makenthis happen.

What do you think schools should do to enable student and employeenaccess to these external tools while simultaneously fulfilling theirnobligation to monitor and protect against abuses? Should administratorsnjust trust that instructional uses of these tools will be okay and dealnreactively with lawsuits / parent complaints / financial costs / medianfeasts as they occur? Since there is no way that school leaders cannmonitor all of the different tools that are out there on the Web,nshould schools have a preemptive ban on all non-school-provided toolsnbecause monitoring is literally impossible? What would appropriatenschool policy and/or guidelines look like for these types of tools?nDoes anyone have a good example of school- or district-level policynlanguage that deals with these issues?

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.