Research question: Are teacher’s privacy and rights being violated over the Internet? How much authority should administrators have over teacher’s personal, non-affiliated school website? Should their school district have access to the teacher’s myspace, even if it is set to private? Do they have the right to check up on teachers “off-of-school grounds” personal lives? Should there be punishment (ex: loosing their job) for the teacher if they find something they feel is inappropriate? Is that an invasion of their privacy? Or should teachers not be allowed to post anything considered inappropriate (ex: pictures of a teacher at a party, not necessarily drinking) on their home webpage? Also, there is information saying teachers are warned not to have a myspace. If you are a teacher, should you not be allowed to have a social network, such as a myspace or a facebook?
I want to show that teachers have lives outside of school and if they are not friends with their students on myspace, why should they have to watch what they post? I understand they are role models for students, but if the students do not have access to their page, I feel they should be able to use a social network to connect with their friends, if it has no connection to their job.
I need to gather information on what teacher’s rights are and the violation of the 1st amendment, Freedom of Speech. I also need to find more cases where teachers were punished and/or lost their job because of what they posted on the internet. I found a quote online from Eschoolnews.com that was a warning for teachers to delete their websites if they had them. It basically said that the dangers of having a website outweigh the benefits.
Sources:
http://personalweb.about.com/b/2006/04/04/teacher-investigated.htm
http://itwire.com.content/view/11772/53/
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4 comments:
I am very interested in this topic that you have chosen. I'm in the process of obtaining an Early Childhood Education Degree and as a future teacher, this issue is one of my concerns.
You have raised some important questions in reference to Teacher's rights and internet privacy. Is there really privacy on the internet?
I've heard of teachers getting fired because of myspace pictures and I don't believe this is right. Their lives outside of school should be their business.
Are you going to provide examples and online news articles in reference to actual incidents in which teachers were fired?
I think this is a good start. I personally feel that although it is their personal life, employers make their own impressions if they were to see controversial myspace pictures, so it may be best to keep those things personal in the physical world. Unfortunately people are judged by appearance, race, hair, clothing, anything you can think as well as their myspace life. I think you can make an interesting arguement on if their user settings were set to private and how that may help. Good idea so far.
Very interesting. Maybe you could also research if employers hire teachers who have a myspace or facebook accounts. Are teacher at risk if htey have any of these accounts? Because lots of times, employers do background checks.
In my opinion, I think teachers can have myspace accounts as long as their websites are clean & do not have inappropiate student-teacher relations.
I think you have a really good topic here. My boyfriend's sister is a teacher and her school district requires that all teacher's myspace and facebook accounts be made private so that their students cannot view them and pry into their personal lives. They also told the teachers that they are not supposed to become friends with their students on the internet. Obviously if their Myspaces and such are made private, the administrators cannot view their profiles either and I don't think they should be able to either.I can ask her a little more about it if you think it'd be helpful at all and ask her what the main guidlines for her school district are!
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