Smarter Balanced Offers Tips for Monitoring Students on Social Media

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) offers the following tips to SBAC schools for monitoring students on social media. The excerpt below is from a single-page document entitled, “Guidance for Social Media Monitoring During the Field Test.”

The SBAC-suggested keys to successful social media “test security trolling”?

1) Set up a school social media site, and encourage students to join.

2) Search social media sites by keyword.

Click on the document below to read for yourself. (Click on image to enlarge.)

 

There is more to this letter than is shown in the image above. The full document can be read here.

Also, here is the section of the letter missing from above. Click on image to enlarge:

The sneakiest component of this “monitoring” is the potential use of a school social media site to track students without their knowing.

School social media sites should include disclaimers that those “following” or “joining” the site realize that their personal social media accounts are open for school site/district monitoring. Otherwise, the school arguably places itself in a legally awkward situation in which a school might be liable for encouraging students based on an undisclosed, ulterior motive.

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Schneider is a southern Louisiana native, career teacher, trained researcher, and author of the ed reform whistle blower, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education.