Technology has become cheaper, easier to use and more powerful — for both kids and those in charge of delivering their education, which means it has become relatively easy for school administrators to monitor their students outside school.
This mainly includes social media sites — Facebook, Twitter, etc. — where students turn for interaction and support that cannot be provided by parents or teachers. At times, students let their frustrations be known on social sites regarding school or outbursts about specific teachers.
Educators now have more opportunities to monitor students around the clock as students complain, taunt and sometimes cry out for help on social media. Services to filter and glean what students do on social networks are being offered by several companies, including automated tools to comb through off-campus postings for signs of danger. Whether school officials should or legally can punish children for their online, off-campus speech is an undefined area of the law.
The problem has taken on new urgency with the case of a 12-year-old Florida girl who committed suicide after classmates relentlessly bullied her online and offline as reported by Somini Senguta of The New York Times. Educators find themselves needing to balance students’ free speech rights against the dangers children can get into at school and sometimes with the law because of what they say in posts on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
However, courts have started to intervene. In September, a federal appeals court in Nevada sided with school officials who suspended a high school sophomore for sending threatening messages on Myspace in which he said he would shoot classmates. In another case in 2011, an Indiana court ruled that school officials had violated the Constitution when they disciplined students for posting pictures on Facebook of themselves at a slumber party, posing with rainbow-colored lollipops shaped like phalluses.
– See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/technology/should-schools-spy-on-students-online-speech/#sthash.HWGeUhcp.dpuf