The rapid growth and rate of change in social networking sites has  created some concerns for New Zealand educators.  As well as providing quick and easy channels for communication, social networking has brought to light a number of issues arising from the public nature of opinions and comments and the amount of personal information that is publically accessible.

School administrators, particularly have expressed concerns in three areas:

• the appropriateness of teachers, students or their parents using these platforms to interact.
• the public nature of material posted by educators and how this may reflect on them as professionals.
• students’ ability to make public comments about each other, their school and their teachers

This NetSafe document is designed to assist schools in focusing their discussion about staff or student use of public social networking sites. Although the document uses Facebook as its prime example, there are other social networking platforms that present similar challenges to schools.

Click here to access this and other NetSafe discussion documents