Va. Board of Education urges policy on social networks as teaching tools

Kimiya Haghighi, 17, had a prose problem. As much as her teachers preached concise writing, her sentences remained long and overwrought — the words poured out, unpunctuated, one after another.

Then Aubrey Ludwig, her 11th-grade English teacher at Langley High School, introduced her class to Twitter, requiring that students tweet their responses to a Hemingway assignment in 140 characters or less. Suddenly, Haghighi’s writing was efficient, declarative, even staccato. “It was a total breakthrough,” she said.

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Such assignments are coming under new scrutiny as Virginia and other states consider restricting how teachers and students interact on social-networking platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Officials want to preserve the educational opportunity offered by Ludwig and other teachers but also want to prevent sexual predators from exploiting the casual tone of such sites to build rapport with potential victims.

The Virginia Board of Education voted Thursday to encourage school districts statewide to adopt policies regulating social-media use by teachers. The move was not as bold as an earlier proposal but still ranks the state as among the first to address such issues.

The push for new restrictions grew, in part, from the case of Kevin Ricks, a former Manassas High School teacher convicted last year of molesting a former student. Ricks exchanged personal messages with several students on Facebook, including the eventual victim.

Now, the debate over how to manage teacher-student contact on social-networking sites is expected to come before local school boards. “Any prudent board would look at crafting a policy on this,” said Sanford S. Williams, a Manassas school board member.

But advocates for stricter rules will face teachers who want to continue using social networking to help educate students.

“Part of my job is to get the students engaged,” said Ludwig. “It’s easier to do that if I can link the homework to Twitter and Facebook. The hope is that when it’s time for the AP exam, what started as a novelty will translate into a real skill.”

Some of Ludwig’s colleagues at Langley have taken a similar approach. English teachers Sandra Hamilton and Sara Vincent asked their students to create Facebook profiles for characters from “The Canterbury Tales,” Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century collection of stories.

“I had to write interests and status updates for the friar in the story — he was like a total frat guy,” said Cyrus Kingdom, a senior. “It’s the kind of assignment I found interesting because I could relate to it.”

The assignment might be innovative but it’s not unique. Facebook is populated by dozens of Chaucer characters: the products of high school English assignments across the country.

Other teachers have formed Facebook groups for their classes, using them to post homework assignments, links to relevant articles and reminders about upcoming tests and due dates. Students are able to keep up with such postings without becoming Facebook friends with their teachers.