Thread: Discovering students' myspace pages

Well, "what you don't know can't hurt you" probably applies here. If it is any consolation I am sure that many teachers are maligned unfairly on these sites.

Wish I could make you feel better. It would be rather tempting to mention at school that you did some facinating reading this summer when school starts. :lol:

Here are some stories you might find interesting:

Free speech? Risky behavior? 'Social websites' pit kids vs. adults
[url]http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2006/03/free_speech_or_.html[/url]

Lewd Web Posting About San Antonio Principal Leads To Suit
[url]http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1706237/posts[/url]

PA Principal sues ex-students for Myspace slander
[url]http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31555/118/[/url]

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The Internet is quickly becoming the Wild West, where individuals can no longer depend on goverments to protect themselves.

Soon, there will be a need and means for self-defense. Instead of taking up arms against bandits, a person will be able to fling an aggressive program against a hostile website. Perhaps viruses will be exchanged instead of merely being blocked. Corporations and individuals will hire experts in cyberdefense who will take the fight to the offender.

For instance, what do you do when the kid slandering your or hacking your website/computer/school LAN is in another country? He's pretty much out of reach of law enforcement or courts.

There was a German teenager that broke into several corporate computers a few years ago. Even when caught, there's nothing the courts or governments could do because he was a minor. I'll bet he was never for want of a job after that. Pulling this kind of stunt is a sure way to get you hired for computer consulting or network security. We're sure to see more of it in the future.

On the other hand, a frontier is always a good thing. We've run out of physical frontiers until technology makes space colonization economically feasable. Soon we'll be fending for ourselves until something like the United States Internet Security and Defence Corps comes into being.

Look at this way: if there were no Internet, they'd be saying the same **** in the hallways, in notes passed in class, or someplace beyond earshot. (Or, a sarcastic whisper to another classmate nearby- you've all seen it before.)

strategies to deal with my feelings. Advice?

Here is my take on it. 1) Some of your students will not like you. This statistically inevitable. 2) I've seen where some students have expressed negative opinions about me on myspace, and the truth is, they have a right to their opinion. When they are not in the classroom, they can do things like that. Now, if they choose to do so in class, that would be unwise... 3) If they aren't accusing you of crimes, or lewd behavior, or anything you could sue over, it probably isn't worth worrying about. Although, again, I think of a line from Master and Commander..."What a fascinating modern age we live in." A couple of decades ago this problem didn't even exist......

Ignorance really is bliss, isn't it.

I have searched for my kids pages too lol. I was suprised at several, and proud of some other kids. I like to freak them out by saying something to them that I got from there and they are wondering where I got it from lol

I have told several of them that they need to clean up their myspace and they get this "oh crap" look on their face. lol

My principal is great about this. She's actually called parents when she's found less than desirable stuff on pages.

She did such a good job of making them sound terrible however that one of my less than computer saavy teammates came to me in a dither because she'd heard another teacher in the school had a myspace page! Heaven forbid

I asked her if she'd seen the page. Well, no. So I had to explain what could be done and how they were set up and that it was ok. She could set one up. (Well, she probably couldn't, but that's a different issue!)

It always hurts when kids say mean things about you. But, that's the nature of the kid and the job. It'll get easier to deal with as time goes on.I never go to ratemyteacher because it does hurt to see kids get revenge through that website. I try to focus on the good of the job. There's lots more of that.

See if your school has the MySpace Guide for School Administrators. It tells you how to go about reporting underage users, inappropriate pictures/posts, cyberbullying, and slander.

There are several of us in our building who monitor student pages and report kids. We print anything first and then report it so we've got a paper trail.

I found a way to see the private sites, too. I have two myspace sites . . . one for my friends and one for my students to use. Once they request to be my friends, I automatically get access to their sites.

I've been happy to report that most of my kiddos behave themselves, and pretty much talk about the same stuff that I have heard them talking about with each other . . . with is generally pretty mundane stuff about who likes whom and the like.

I did stumble upon one site that a student had made about one of our teachers. It was very, very inappropriate . . . not just "I don't like so-and-so" type stuff, but implications of rather horrible stuff. They were able to get that site shut down, and there was legal action taken against the student who put the site together.