Districts are still fearful of teachers communicating with students using Facebook
I just heard from the superintendent of yet another school district that's struggling with whether to allow its teachers to connect with students using Facebook. Here's my reply to her:
Speaking as someone who has a law degree, attorneys (like IT staff) are inherently conservative. The bottom line is that Facebook is just another mechanism to communicate, like the phone and written mail (in fact, Facebook is arguably more public than either of those other two). Do you have policies prohibiting teachers from using those to connect with students and parents?
I've written about this before (and here's a post from Doug Johnson arguing against format bigotry). Other districts - that operate in the same legal and regulatory environments that you do -