Only 35 percent of the educators, administrators, and school board members who registered for the National School Boards Association's annual Technology + Learning (T+L) Conference and responded to an eMail survey given before the event was held in Dallas earlier this month said their districts had policies to address the use of social-networking sites by their students. Fifty percent of respondents said their districts had no such policies, and 15 percent weren't sure.

The survey's findings suggest a degree of confusion on the topic that was reflected in forums held during the T+L Conference itself and in a separate webcast hosted by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) last week.

Among respondents who said their districts have a policy that covers social-networking web sites, the most common approach seems to be the use of a firewall or filtering software to block students' access to these sites while at school.

When asked what their policy says, about half of respondents to the NSBA survey indicated their policy is simply to filter such sites, while some educators also said they require students to sign an acceptable-use policy making it clear that unauthorized use of these sites during school hours is prohibited.

"Students at our school and their parents sign a form stating they will not attempt to use MySpace or other [such] web sites without permission and supervision of the teacher," wrote one respondent. Said another, "Acceptable-use policies have been put in place that define what is acceptable in an educational setting and the consequences of abuse. There are some sites that have been physically blocked. These policies undergo scrutiny on a regular basis and are updated as deemed necessary, as technology advances."

Interestingly, very few of the responses included teaching students about responsible use of online social networks--a point that Anne Bryant, NSBA's executive director, noted.

"It is important to keep in mind that just blocking access to social web sites at school is not the end of the story," said Bryant in a statement. "Most of the misuse of these sites takes place at home, but still affects the classroom. We have to teach our students about the safe and proper use of social web sites."

Thirty-six percent of those polled by NSBA said students' use of MySpace and similar sites has been "disruptive" to their school district's learning environment. Of these educators, about two-thirds said the posting of inappropriate content or personally identifiable information posed a problem; about 40 percent said cyber-bullying or "causing too much time off task" were problems; and one in four said the creation of false pages for administrators or teachers has been a problem.

A 'MySpace world'

The need to teach students about the proper use of such sites was a point of emphasis in CoSN's Nov. 15 webcast, titled "Keeping Students Secure in a MySpace World."