Social Media Education

Ideas, Issues, and Solutions for using socal media in education

In requesting to have Pinterest unblocked in our district, this is the final response:

"Evaluation of the site 'as a whole' and the total value of the entire focus of the site as 'educational value' in a school environment, balanced against consideration for availability of what educational content is available in a like manner on other sites, the request to unblock this site is deemed not in the best interest overall.  Unfortunately unblocking of the site opens it in total and unfortunately this also includes content that is not appropriate, including nudity outside of an artistic nature, vulgarity, profanity, and portrayal of gender and cultures in manner that is not acceptable under FWISD and even general standards.

Perhaps pinterest.com will at some time create a divisional structure for "education" as has youtube (youtube.edu) where content is filtered internal of the site for dissimination to institutes that wish to access education value materials outside of inappropriate content for their setting."

This seems like another example of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". When are we going to teach students how to use this form of communication appropriately if we can't access it?  It's like we live in this bubble of public education, so concerned with the here and now (the tests and the data) that we are not preparing our students to live in the real world.