Philip Slee (JSC, 2011) refers to research on bans of mobile phones that found the ban to be ineffective, and has suggested that the harder path is education, understanding and increasing knowledge for both adults and children about how to manage life in a digital age. The Learning on Line website (provided by the Victoria by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development) provides some critical advice regarding the use of social media tools from their experiences of trials and pilots over the past three years.5 These include: • Having a specific and clearly articulated educational purpose for using technology, for example, collaboration or group interchange. • Work with tools designed for education wherever possible. • Any social media tools created for the classroom should be administered, and therefore moderated, by the teacher. • Refer to terms and conditions on external sites to assess their suitability (e.g. privacy, safety). • Parent permission must be obtained for sites where a student does not meet the terms and conditions (e.g. they must be over 13 years of age), or where student work or photos are being published to the Internet. • Personal information must not be published, including a student’s name as an email address, and students should use avatars or general, rather than personal, photos if necessary. • Develop and implement acceptable use agreements, with clear consequences for breaches of behaviour. • Skills and knowledge to act safely online are explicitly taught and reinforced when new technologies are introduced. • Involvement of the whole school community can be encouraged by sharing students’ work, e.g. via staff meetings, newsletters.
2.2 Policy regarding mobile phone use in schools There appears to be an increasing shift to recognising the benefit of mobile phone use in a classroom setting. Policy development in this area is presently caught between recognition of the potential power (and savings on resources) of mobile communication technologies as educational tools, and concern for the possible increase in cyberbullying incidents if mobile phones legitimately enter the schoolgrounds. In the US, initially restrictive policies regarding mobile phone use by students were reviewed after the Columbine school shootings in 1996 and the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and mobile phone use policy was deferred to local school districts (Thomas & Orthober, 2011). While the majority of secondary schools have bans on mobile phone use or possession on school grounds, some schools are starting to recognise the benefits of student use of mobile phones, such as the Dysart Unified School District in Arizona. Initially, policy changes in Dysart were born of financial need, as cuts to budgets meant that updating computers and programs became difficult; however, in September 2010, the governing board voted to allow mobile phones in class “for research purposes”.6 Network etiquette and privacy considerations are part of acceptable use policies, as well as specific policies for staff using microblogging (Twitter), mobile devices, and social networking.7 5
http://www.education.vic.gov.au/management/lol/ http://www.azcentral.com/community/westvalley/articles/2010/10/15/20101015dysart-unified-school-district-cellphone-policy.html 7 https://schoolweb.dysart.org/EdTech/Content.aspx?eiID=179 6
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Keeping Queensland Schools Safe: report from the Queensland Schools Alliance Against Violence 17 October 2011