I decided to use a mix of logic puzzles and traditional maths problems. For example, on the first day, I posted:

It was Nancy’s first day at school. The teacher suggested that it would be a good idea for each child to meet every other child in the class. The teacher said, “When you meet, please shake hands and introduce yourself by name.” If there were 11 children in the class, how many total handshakes were there?

It was brilliant to see the conversation that flowed and how parents were using great mathematical language and logic to solve the problem. Throughout the week, I posed other problems, which generated more conversation.

I can see myself using Facebook more often during events, such as Seachtain na Gaeilge, Book Week and maybe some festivals, to engage conversation. It’s a simple and free way to involve parents in education. Below are the rest of the puzzles I posted:

1. You are on an island and there are three crates of fruit that have washed up in front of you. One crate contains only apples. One crate contains only oranges. The other crate contains both apples and oranges. Each crate is labeled. One reads “apples”, one reads “oranges”, and one reads “apples and oranges”. You know that NONE of the crates have been labeled correctly – they are all wrong. If you can only take out and look at just one of the pieces of fruit from just one of the crates, how can you label ALL of the crates correctly?
2. Ricky had a bag containing colorful marbles. The colors are red, green and blue. The total number of marbles he had in his bag is 60. There are 4 times as many red marbles as green marbles. 6 more blue marbles than green marbles. How many marbles of each color did Ricky have?
3. Jack sells apples in the market. First day he sells 1234 apples. Second day he sells 1456 apples. On the third day, he sells 134 less than the second day. How many apples are sold in three days?
4. A Man works on the 10th floor and always takes the elevator down to ground level at the end of the day. Yet every morning he only takes the elevator to the 7th floor and walks up the stairs to the 10th floor, even when is in a hurry. Why?

Of course, cyber-bullying is nothing new. Furthermore, cyber-bullying is not new with regards to teachers. One could argue that at school level, the infamous Rate My Teacher started a campaign that seemed to encourage the public victimisation of teachers. For a time, this was one of the most popular web sites in the country and much was made in the media surrounding it. I may have been lucky that the children I taught didn’t comment on me but some of my colleagues were upset by their name being dirtied in public view. Most of these teachers were good people, doing a good job. The fact that this was allowed to happen anonymously gave people the opportunity to vent their agendas without the need to be answerable for any inaccuracies or insults.

At this time in 2001, schools, in general, were not using social media as a tool. Many schools had web sites and email access. Some had used services like NetNanny or Phorm to try and prevent access to inappropriate web sites. However, there was little in the way of two-way social media interaction. This has now changed with several schools having Facebook, Twitter and Google accounts. The landscape has changed dramatically but ICT policies remain very similar to when they first came out in 1997, 6 years before Facebook was born.

Facebook is by far the most popular way that schools have engaged in social networking with dozens of primary schools opening Facebook Fan Pages. My school is one such school that has done this. The idea is that we realise that the vast majority of our parents have a Facebook account and most of them check it at least once a day. If we can provide our school news to the parents via the Facebook page, I believe there is a higher likelihood that they will be read. All our blog posts, noticeboard updates and news updates go to our Facebook page and parents can “like” or comment on them. In fact, it can be quite useful to see how many “likes” a post gets for our own “market research.”

However, similarly to what seems to have happened in one or two of the four secondary schools in the news, where Facebook was used as a tool to post negative, potentially bullying comments about schools, there is potential for the same to happen to schools with Facebook pages. If schools have not updated their policies to include social media, what can they do to prevent abusive messages going up on their page, or anywhere else on the Internet?

Some would argue that we should ban social media use in schools. However, as with almost everything else in life, I believe it all comes down to education. With regards to the Internet, there are several programmes out there for schoolchildren, Webwise.ie being the best known, which have been around for years and aim to help student make good choices about their use of technology to keep themselves and others safe. Any scheme must include how to interact on the web about your school and your teachers. I also believe there needs to be an update to any school’s Internet Acceptable Usage Policy as a matter of urgency.

Going back briefly to my own school’s experience, we have updated our policy to include social media. It can be found on the school’s web site under publications. My own personal motto is that everyone is trusted until they lose the right to be trusted and then they are never trusted again. If somebody posts something against our policy on our Facebook page, they are barred from it, forever. The short-term “thrill” that the person may get from a nasty update results in them being excluded from our Facebook page, cutting off an important avenue of communication but more importantly, cutting off the opportunity to be part of a happy online community.

I would be fully in favour of social media posts being used as part of a behaviour system in any school and enforced accordingly. We have already seen the drastic effects of cyber bullying on teenagers but schoolteachers are no different. Targeted abuse of a teacher is as unacceptable as it is for a pupil as it would be for anyone. Perhaps the world of celebrity has made us slightly immune to making horrible comments online until the insults result in legal cases or worse.

With regards to the students in the schools who abused teachers on Facebook, I don’t believe there should be any debate on the severity of the punishment. One should treat any online interaction in exactly the same way as one would treat interactions in the real world. If a group of students decided to sit me down in a room full of people and hurl abuse at me or threaten to abuse me, there would be no debate.  Perhaps we just need to accept that online abuse is already epidemic and we need to ensure that we are protected from it, whether we are teachers, students, celebrities or whoever.

• www.esafety-adviser.com which is where he promotes his school e-safety services
• www.esafety-adviser.com/blog where he talks about all manner of e-safety subjects including research, technology, opinion etc.
  Phorm CrunchBase company profile the company profile of Phorm

The Blue Coat survey, which was completed in June 2011, interviewed 164 Irish students in secondary school and at third level, to determine how this generation is currently communicating.

From a primary level point of view, we need to sit up and take notice of this.  How many of us teach social networking to our pupils?  Probably close to none.  While only a small survey, the results clearly show that social media sites  are a far more dominant channel for communication among young people than traditional email.

While Facebook was the clear leader with 88% of respondents saying they have a Facebook account, I don’t think we need to focus on one social network.  There are already a number of social networks aimed at the under-13 market, such as Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters.  Children are using these sites; some of them are using them badly, which means that it’s likely they’ll continue to do so when they’re older, unless lessons are taught.

Looking even further into the future, Michael O’Hara, managing director, Data Solutions commented on the
results, with respect to when these students enter the workforce:

“This will bring up a whole set of new issues for employers.”

Following this, Nigel Hawthorn, Blue Coat Systems said, “When today’s students enter the workforce they will be completely in tune with the new ways of communicating and collaborating online, as most are already using social networking sites, blogs, Skype or instant messaging. Employers now need to look at new ways to facilitate their needs and expectations. “

If we’re not starting these kinds of lessons in primary school and keep teaching children to use things they just won’t use in adulthood – and I’m only guessing here – things like PowerPoint and Email, we’re probably not giving them the start they might need when they reach 13.

Thanks to Niamh O’Sullivan from Comit Communications & Marketing for sending the information to us.

Should Facebook be used in Primary Schools?  From one angle, this can be answered very quickly with a resounding “no”.  To use Facebook, one must be 13 years of age or older.  Given that 99% of primary school children are under 13, that just about wraps it up….or does it?

At primary level, there are a number of people who are over 13 who use Facebook, namely, staff and parents.  I believe that if Facebook could be used to link these cohorts together, it can actually improve children’s learning in school.

Most schools have a web site but how many parents can honestly say that they visit it regularly?  However, how many parents visit their Facebook profile regularly?  If a school could bring their web site content to Facebook, this would help parents keep up to date with what’s going on in the school.  It

Source: http://www.rssgraffiti.com/

is reasonably easy to do this.  The school can set up a Facebook page and then install an RSS Feeder such as RSS graffiti on to it.  Whenever the school web site is updated, the Facebook page gets an update.  Parents simply need to “like” the school page and they become subscribed to any changes on the web site.

As well as feeding the school’s web site updates, I also feed through a photograph of the noticeboard in our school foyer.  This is useful for parents who can’t get into the school in the morning.

Often, I post reminders and messages on the school’s Facebook page.  For example, if we have a book fair coming, I might write that as a status message.  The great thing for me as an administrator on the Facebook page is that any message I type up doesn’t come from my personal Facebook account.  Facebook automatically generates the message from the “Admin”.  If teachers or other staff wish to post on the school Facebook page, they can also be made as administrators.

My garden, November 2010

Another way I have used Facebook was when we had a period of bad weather.  As children were unable to come into school, I sent some fun exercises to parents to do with their children at home.  One exercise was to post up a photograph of their back garden during the snow.  Another was to write their favourite “snow joke”.

One of the more subtle ways that Facebook can be useful for is feedback.  The “Like” button is great for getting feedback on status updates or posts.  If we announce that we won a competition on Facebook, usually we’ll get between 6 and 10 “likes” on the page.  Other news gets no feedback.  For a school, if we can see that parents like certain things more than others, it can help us to tailor themes for planning lessons or begin face to face conversations, e.g. “I saw you liked our project…”

Parents can also start conversations on Facebook.  Some parents have set up art classes for the school using Facebook and others have simply asked a question, which we can answer.

With all this great stuff, there’s obviously some pitfalls.  The main one is the complete lack of control a school has to make sure that inappropriate is not posted on the Facebook page.  Another question mark is security.  My answer to this is to have a well written section on Web 2.0 usage.  This can form part of an Internet Acceptable Usage Policy or a general behaviour policy.

I would suggest that schools consider adding the following items to their policy.

• Users cannot advertise products or services on the page
• Users should not post anything on the page that could be deemed as offensive
• Users should not ask to become “friends” with staff as failure to respond may cause offence
• Users cannot tag or post photographs of children on the page

The sanction for breaking the rules is an automatic ban.  In other words, one is completely trusted to use the page appropriately until they break one of the rules.  While this doesn’t assure that the page will not be spammed or used for inappropriate reasons, Facebook is not anonymous and the offenders are caught.

Our Facebook page has been up for almost 2 years without incident.  We have found it to be useful for all the reasons above.  While our children cannot engage in the conversations by themselves, if they can see Facebook being used well by the people around them, it is more likely that when they get to use it, that they will also play by the rules.

There is a lot of truth in the story of any classroom that lots of people might have the same questions but only one or two will ask them.  In light of this, when ever we get a general question asked of us, we’re going to publish the question on our Facebook page.  Over time, we hope that our Facebook page will become a resource for teachers and others who have a question about anything related to primary school.

You can check out our Facebook page by going to http://facebook.com/anseo.net.  Our Facebook page contains links to all of our articles, any good links we’ve found and now some of the questions we’re being asked.  If you have a Facebook page, let us know and we might “like” you!

I wanted a way to branch out to parents. While our school web site provides lots of up to date news, whether we care to admit it or not, it is not the first place our parents log into when they load up their Internet browser.

The latest statistics say that one in fourteen people all over the world have a Facebook account. In fact, the statistics continue with the fact that almost everyone with an account logs into Facebook at least once per day. In my school, I believe half the families have a Facebook account and I felt I could tap into this in order to improve our communication with parents.

I have been in my current job as principal of my school for just over two years and one of the things I’ve been conscious of is the main reason why conflict occurs is due to lack of communication. I have strived to ensure that communication is a key element of my vision. Where there is an opportunity to improve it, I will investigate it.  Last year I was in contact with my colleagues in Letterkenny Educate Together about a matter and I was looking for their web site. Whilst I didn’t find one, I did come across a Facebook page, which seems to be run by a group of parents. I loved the fact that it gave a medium for parents to communicate with the school.

I decided to tap into this and created a Facebook page for our school.  I made myself, the chairperson of the school and the secretary administrators so they could update the page with news and answer any comments.  I set up an application called RSS Graffiti, which updates our Facebook page every time someone adds an article to our school web site.  We then advertised the page within the school and waited to see what happened.

The success was almost instant.  Over 50 Facebook users signed up to the page within a couple of weeks.  Within a few months we had over 100 fans.

The greatest surprise for me was the amount of parents and grandparents who interacted with the site.  Every time somebody posted an update on the Facebook page, several fans would click the “like” button.  On a less regular basis, some people would add their comments to status updates usually to give kudos.

It was really only when I was giving a talk at a conference and I mentioned briefly that I was using Facebook that the word “security” came up.

How could we control what was posted on the Facebook page?  What would happen if somebody posted something inappropriate?  How could we control who looked at the page?

I didn’t have an answer immediately but spent a bit of time thinking about it.  My initial reaction was to remove the page.  There was no way to control the content on the page.  However, the more I thought about it, I realised that having a Facebook page could work but I needed to update our school’s Internet Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP).

Like our school web site, there are a number of rules about posting to it.  Children cannot be photographed on their own or identified by name.  The images used must be under a certain size to ensure they can’t be manipulated.  All videos must not identify a child’s name or details.  If a parent wishes their child to be taken down from the web site, they are fully entitled to this.

It was the same for Facebook.  Our AUP advised parents not to “tag” photos of their children for their own protection.  Similarly they should not add comments that could identify their children.  We also needed to make sure that comments added to our Facebook page were appropriate.  For example, we asked parents not to advertise products on the page.  We also asked them to be respectful of the school (as well as other schools and businesses).  Essentially we asked them not to write anything that they wouldn’t say face to face.  Finally, we asked parents not to ask to “friend” staff members.  This was to ensure the staff’s private lives remained as private as possible.

So how did we control this?  The simple answer is we didn’t. We’re working it on a trust level.  Our AUP states that if the rules are breached then the user is banned from the Facebook page.   After several months, everybody is on board and playing nice!

Apart from displaying updated articles from our school web site, we’ve been using our Facebook page for lots of different reasons.  Some parents are using it to arrange Communion classes.  Another parent organised guitar lessons after school.  Some parents have asked us questions about school openings and other similar queries.

We’ve used it most recently to update parents on the school’s situation with regards to the snow sweeping across the country.  Every few hours, I update the parents using Facebook on my phone.   This has gone down really well and we’re happy to see good feedback from it.

We’ve also used it to promote school events such as fundraisers, carol singing and more.  We are now using it to update parents on school closures for planning days or staff meetings.  I get a great thrill when parents answer queries or comment on a status update.

From informal chats with parents in the school, I think using Facebook has gone down really well.  Combined with RSS feeds, email subscriptions, our web site and old-fashioned notes in schoolbags, communication is the least of our problems in the school.

I’m not ego-centric enough to think that my wife leaving Facebook is newsworthy in itself.  It was the reasoning for leaving and the reaction to her last Facebook status message that interested me and made me think about the place of social networking in education.

The last update was something along the lines of:

“I’m leaving Facebook.  If anyone would like to get in contact with me from now on, please text or email me”

The reaction was amazing.  Within an hour of this message, Rozz was contacted through text and email by more people than had used Facebook to do the same.  In fact, since Rozz has deleted her account, she is getting more messages through other media than ever before.  She is having conversations.  She is having discussions. She is probably using the Internet more sociably now than before.

Rozz decided to leave Facebook after thinking about it for a long time.  The final straw for her was when she was having a chat with an old school friend who was not on Facebook.  The friend was amazed that Rozz knew so much about their ex-classmates.  However, Rozz hadn’t spoken to any of these classmates any more than her old school friend had.  Essentially, she was using Facebook to eavesdrop on other people’s lives.  Following this logic, probably all her Facebook friends were doing the same, without “dropping in for a chat”

Another thing Rozz noticed was that the people she met up with most were not on Facebook, (or if they were, they never used it).  Facebook seemed to make meeting people in person unnecessary – sure you can find out what’s going on in people’s lives by logging on.  When I thought about it too, she was right.

A final interesting thing that happened after Rozz’s final status update was the number of people who sent her messages of support.  They all said that they would like to leave Facebook too….. but….  The “but” was always followed by some excuse.  Mine is “I find it good for sharing information”, which is true.  However, I admit my guilty pleasure of checking out photographs of my ex-classmates’ weddings or milestone birthday parties, is another reason too.

Facebook and other social networks seem to encourage a different type of socialising.  A friend of mine says that people seem to use it mainly to show off “how great they are” (his words, not mine).  I’ve tried to convince him otherwise by showing off all the brilliant collaboration that is done between like-minded people.  He simply thinks people update status messages or photos to get a reaction.  His own use of social networking is limited to texting, phonecalls and emails.

As Ireland’s education system lags behind everything technological, the number of schools using Facebook or social networks for education is very small.  Probably negligible.  However, are social networks good for schools?  What can they use them for and why would they want to?

A few years ago one of the incarnations of this web site was to set up a social network of schools.  I had ten schools signed up and the idea was for each school to get in contact with each other to communicate with each other and complete joint projects, etc.  It was a similar idea to eTwinning except the schools would be from Ireland.  I thought it was a great idea but it didn’t take off.  Perhaps, being generous to myself,  I was a little ahead of my time.  (It was almost three years after I wrote my first WordPress school web site in Ireland that blogging took off at primary school level)

Let’s say a Facebook for Irish schools was launched.  Let’s say every primary school in the country got an account and they could do all the things that one can do on Facebook.  No-one except for Irish primary schools could join this social network so it was entirely safe.  Each school would have a designated person to update their profile too.

The following Facebook functions, I think would work really well.

1. The photo album – it’s really easy to use and schools can share their photos with other schools.
2. Grouping schools – one could easily set up “groups” of schools by county, etc.
3. Wall – schools could write public messages to each other
4. Email – schools could email each other
5. Apps – certain educational apps might be good to start competitions with each other (virtual boggle for example)
6. Sharing facilities – schools could share documents, policies, etc. in a reasonably private network

This is all sounding great so far.  But what wouldn’t work in a social network?  Why would schools not want to join in?  Well, I think all the reasons why Rozz left Facebook and why my friend refuses to take part.

• Would some schools use it to show off?
• Would local principals need to meet up in person?
• Would we be tempted to eavesdrop on each other?
• Does it encourage cliques?
• Is it a little too open?
• What would you do if a colleague asked to become a “friend” and you didn’t want to?  Awkward…?

And finally, worse yet,  how would you feel if you were unfriended by another school?

Rozz is planning on sharing her thoughts on Twitter, her photographs on Flickr and anything else on a blog.  Privacy-wise, each web site service will be password protected and only members will have access.  I like her thinking.  Facebook is a bit too open.  When I log in, I’ll read about 20-30 people’s lives.  If I log into Rozz’s blog, there’s only one life I’ll be reading about.

We’re always on the lookout for ways to engage with the teachers who don’t come to INTO meetings because we feel they get their information via the media and never get to hear an alternative view of the state of the nation and the education system.

The INTO does release its information on its own web site. However, many members do not access it. Younger people want information to come to them on services they already use, not the other way around. Unfortunately an RSS feed is no longer enough.

Within 3 days of the page opening, there were over 300 members. Already there are several “conversations” happening about INTO issues. These are issues that traditionally would have had to wait until branch meetings.

The branch hope that the Facebook page will develop into a way of communicating quickly with a large number of teachers and other people who may be sympathetic.

I believe this could be one of the most important things the INTO has done this year. If this was rolled out on a national basis, it could be an incredibly powerful tool in their talks with the government.