Thursday, May 6, 2010

Ban Social Media

This blog was suppose to be up along time ago. Lately My one & only laptop that has less then 200GB has been full. So I have had to clean up stuff & find useful sites to move my files to. Hopefully I can get a mac computer again & get me some more hardrive space.

If you have been following my twitter or Facebook status you might have seen that I have had surgery. I wrote a blog post @ the hospital a few hrs after I was out of surgery but it didn't post:( I even saved it to a word document but it would not even let me send it as a e-mail attachment. Copy and past epic fail to!

Last week a NJ Middle school principal thought It would be a genius idea to get all of the students that attend his school off from sites like facebook,myspace twitter etc. he is wasn't just talking about at SCHOOL he was talking about for there FULL middle school yrs!

A e-mail was sent out to parents to take on a voluntarily ban to get the students off such sites. Read the full e-mail here http://wcbstv.com/technology/facebook.social.networking.2.1662565.html

"Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!

There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! Let me repeat that – there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None.

Wow! that is some pretty heavy stuff! I can explain several reasons why students would want to be on such sites like that.

What could possibly invoke such a response from a man who holds such a responsible position? His intentions seem to be pure, as he thinks social networking sites such as Facebook are making kids’ lives harder due to cyber-bullying. But is banning kids from these sites the way to fix the problem?

Surely a better solution would be to encourage children to be more respectful to each other, and punish bullying more severely in whatever form it manifests itself.

Not only does he have a problem with social networking sites. He wants parents to check there text messages which im all for but to take cell phones away from kids and check them whenever sounds like to me you have a trust issue with your kids. Right now I believe we should be focused on educating the students rather then pulling the plug.

Below is my take on the e-mail when I got it last week.


I get the bullying part the principal is trying to stop but baning it is the not the right answer.