Ohio district puts Facebook limits on teachers

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — Teachers cannot become friendly with students on Facebook and other social networking sites and can’t text or send them instant messages under a new policy in one of Ohio’s largest school districts.

The Dayton Public Schools also prohibits teachers from responding to students’ attempts at communicating through any personal or professional accounts not approved by the district  the Dayton Daily News reported.

The Dayton district adopted the rules after consulting with the Ohio School Boards Association. The association has said it’s seeing more interest from school districts on the issue of teachers and social media and has suggested districts lay out policies against teachers fraternizing with students through electronic media, the newspaper reported.

School districts can’t ignore social media as a tool of communication, but “as with any medium of communication, it can be misused,” Hollie Reedy, chief counsel for the state association told the Dayton Daily News.

Although teachers in Missouri have protested a state law limiting online communication between teachers and students, the president of the Dayton teachers union welcomes the new policy.

“I think in this age of all this media out there, that’s probably a safe thing for our teachers,” said David Romick, president of the Dayton Education Association. “We hear stories all the time about kids who, for various reasons, (retaliate) against teachers on social media.”

Missouri lawmakers approved a ban on teachers having private conversations with students over Internet sites after more than 80 Missouri teachers lost their licenses between 2001 and 2005 because of sexual misconduct, the Dayton newspaper reported. Some of those cases involved exchanging explicit online messages with students.

Missouri’s governor wants the law repealed after a judge, concerned about free speech rights, temporarily blocked it. Teachers have complained that the law will hamper their ability to keep in touch with students.

Some other southwest Ohio school districts prohibit staff members from accessing social network sites during school hours and on district equipment, the newspaper reported.

Beavercreek City Schools Superintendent Nick Verhoff said his district’s policy authorizes teachers to access social media from the district’s network, providing there is an educational purpose and they have the principal’s approval.

Personal access and use of social media, blogs or chat rooms from the district’s network is prohibited, Verhoff said.

___

Information from: Dayton Daily News, http://www.daytondailynews.com

Share and Enjoy

Facebook to reward people who find glitches on its sec network

Expose the chinks in security network of Facebook and get rewarded for it too, says the social networking site, which has already paid $40,000(over Rs 18 lakh) in the past three weeks to those who done it.
Facebook has launched its ‘bug bounty’ programme a few weeks ago, where it offered

to pay for disclosure of security bugs to the company.

“A couple of years ago, we decided to formalise a ‘whitehat’ programme to encourage these researchers to look for bugs and report them to us … A few weeks ago, we took that programme to the next level — we started paying rewards to those who report bugs to us,” Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan said on the official blog.

He added that the bug bounty programme was established as an effort to recognise and reward “these individuals for their good work and encourage others to join.”

According to the company website, Facebook has more than 750 million active users globally. Its userbase in India stood at 25 million at the end of April this year.

Facebook has met severe criticism globally on a range of issues, including online privacy, child safety, and security loopholes.

It has been working to tackle the situation, introducing new security features to counter the attacks on the website.

“The programme has already paid out more than $40,000 in only three weeks and one person has already received more than $7,000 for six different issues flagged,” Sullivan said.

The programme has made the site more secure — by surfacing issues large and small, introducing Facebook to novel attack vectors, and helping it improve lots of corners in its code, he added.

About forty eight people have successfully identified problems and have been acknowledged on Facebook’s “whitehat” page.

Facebook pays about $ 500 for reporting such issues and increases the reward for specific bugs, the blog said.

The company has also assured that even if the methods used to intrude into Facebook systems are not legal, they would not face any legal action.

“If you give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public and make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our service during your research, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you,” the blog said.

Share and Enjoy