With regards to use of My Space and Facebook, we ran a seminar about a
month ago for our 9th grade students. We created a powerpoint addressing
the issue from both a hashkafic perspective as well as a safety one and
showed the students actual My Space and Facebook pages of other Jewish
teens from around the country and asked them to vote on whether the pages
were safe or not safe. Many of these pages included such personal details
as home addresses, school locations, and phone numbers. (Likely some of
these pages belong to students at your schools.)

We did not speak to any students individually about their content, but
asked them as a group to consider that if information is online, they need
to be comfortable with their grandmother/Rabbi/future employer reading it.

In advance of this seminar, we let the parents know what we were doing,
and referred them to parent resource sites about the topic. We asked them
to discuss internet safety with their children and clarify to their
children what they considered to be acceptable use of the internet.

I can only echo my anonymous colleague's observation - this is a critical
issue and relevant to all of us.

Aliza Libman
Tanach teacher and ninth grade dean
Maimonides School
Brookline, MA



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2007 06:46AM by mlb.