I’m sure you’ve heard by now the Principal in NJ that is asking parents to ban all Social-Networking sites from students. You can find his full e-mail to parents at the link or watch this interview below:
So basically I take two things away from this video:
1. Parents are the problem and need to be told by the school how to raise their children.
2. That because “2% of kids are going to say something” we want you to ban all social-networking sites.
That’s funny because I’m sure that:
2% of kids have bullied on the playground yet we’ve never banned recess.
2% of kids have bullied on the bus….yet we haven’t banned buses.
2% of kids have bullied at the bus stop….yet we haven’t banned bus stops.
Do I need to continue?
Then you have Steve Nelson, the chief IT strategist for the State of Oregon Department of Education, who just connected all 400,000 public school children in the state to Google Apps. Giving every student the power of Gchat, Gdocs, GCal and Gmail creating a state wide social-networking platform for all public school children in the state. Oh…right…and saved $1.5 million a year.
I have looked to find more coverage on this but no video by ABC and very little talk of this at all outside local Oregon sites and technology blogs. Why doesn’t Steve get a turn telling how he’s connecting kids for the betterment of education? Right…I forgot….there’s nothing to be scared of in that story.
And we wonder why parents are confused. This principal wants to ban students from connecting, and this state wants to connect them all together.
I love this new world that we are now living in and all this stuff we’re trying to figure out. I just wish both of these stories would get equal attention.
