has italian we're back with another episode of the edge where we decide to discuss controversial topics to benefit our students here at p t a h s teens are often on their phones on some sort of social media site many adults don't understand the obsession with social media because they didn't have the same accessibility to the internet teens generally want to share what they're doing and how they feel online in addition to facebook teens have access to many different social media snap chat as we all know but don't always follow putting your entire life online and can be can also be detrimental to you in the future because when you put online can always be traced back to you later in life so today we are here with talking with officer steve rick who has been a police officer for the past twenty six years and has been our resource officer here since children twelve his helps students resolve problems and that they've been having with social media and he is here to share his expertise about the problems that b t h s ok so what is your overall opinion about social media in general thanks for having me and first of all social media is a great thing to have it's opened up a lot of people who ordinarily can't communicate well with others to try and find friends it's a way to stay in touch with relatives and friends who are no longer in the area so it definitely has its benefits its negatives are sometimes we know too much about each other time some sometimes we put too much of our own personal life there on search social media so you know when you're with somebody eight hours a day you really don't want to talk to them for eight hours a day right but with social media it tends to be that just want to drive down the road and watch how many people are on their telephones either searching or talking right so we're in constant communication and constant communication that there's a platform an educational platform the you guys can use during the school day or even outside a school where you can communicate with your teachers my understanding is that at moto so you can post something but it has to be authorized by the teacher and you don't have to give too much information the negatives to me are overbearing talking about severe depression anxiety issues and a lot of these are caused by social and how do you how would it be caught by such an elective something once again the cyber bullying is a big issue right now right so ordinarily you  wouldn't say something to somebody space that you're more than willing to put out in a moment of anger just by using those little thumbs right and that stuff really cannot be taken away very easily if it ever does and so if you're looking at that the analogy i like to use with kids your when we were kids if somebody didn't like me they and maybe two of their friends didn't like me they were upset with me for whatever reason and that was a lot to take now with let's just use facebook we all have friends right there not really your friends but we put something  somebody and five hundred people hit the like but that's a lot for anybody to think that they have five hundred people who like that disparaging remark about you so that has a lot to do with yeah who is suffering from what they believe is bullying and look just because somebody hurt your feelings from a post does not necessarily minute cyber bullying and we will post i believe we have the the section under totally title eighteen of harassment yet and we can go over that yes can you put the image on the screen the person engaging in continuing course of conduct of making any and the following as electronic means directly to a child and or by publication through an electronic social media level crime but it can become serious it has to be a continuous course of conduct it has to be you know has to meet certain requirements there you have to make or threat right of harm you have to threaten to harm somebody but most of those first level the first time you would be cited under that section the state has to give you the opportunity to go through the version reprogram the diversionary program basically you're going to go through the system and you're going to learn why what you did was wrong it's not going to be easy you're not going to get out of it but when you're done you can legally say you know i have never been arrested or cited for anything yeah times when things are bad and they tend to put things out and like i said it's easier to do from when you're at home sitting in your bedroom to start these these harassing text messages or social media messages rather than the walk up to somebody space anymore and do it so where should we draw the line of what's put online and what not but i'm all right so honestly you wouldn't say it in person online how has social media benefited you like within the school well within the school one of the things you guys see me walk around and talk to everybody but i get plenty  f let's say concerned parents or citizens who will call and they'll bring up what they believe to be discouraging remarks or disturbing photos on somebody's social media so if it's an open public site look it's part of our job is to go on and check these things out although a lot of times we can't take action it doesn't give us some knowledge is what that person is all about right so it benefits us that when it bends it benefits us to see if there are text messages that may show a student in a decline in their grades or following and you can get on there and see exactly why see why they may be failing at that ok you brought up parents how could a lot of my students upset first of all unless you pay for that phone and that cell service i encourage all parents to monitor what's going on on those and you don't have to go in every day and lock down the phone and you know you come in here and give me all this but be knowledgeable learn how to do it all you have to do is google these things and it will tell you how you can monitor their actual web sites that can help you monitor  learn about the vaults that their kids may have on there that hold photos or messages mine is if i start seeing something out of the ordinary sadness the pression then i'm going to want to monitor the phone i want to see what's going on and it's my phone yeah it's not your phone till you start paying for it and you know part of that is trust but we have way too many who don't know what social media is all about way too many parents but they do have to monitor that and restrict the means to have fifteen social media sites and you're constantly seeing drama stop if you're the best kid in the world and you don't have any what you've done on social media one of the biggest problems they have out there is that they used their not going to if they see a problem they're not going to once in their school if they see a problem your let's just say employment or bashing your plat past employer online they're not going to want to hire you because they know if something happens with you there you know so it has does affect it can stop you from doing something you want to do ok i say my profile is private why does it matter what i put online if it's private it's a good question i would tell you that it's never totally private right because how many followers or friends do you have that aren't right so once you go on to the earth are you private right so once again there's nothing i i will i will i'm trying to come up with a good example for you as to what is on those phones so one of our biggest problems with the phones through social media is sexually explicit photos right so we do something stupid and that picture goes out there now if that picture goes away in snap chat there's a good chance it's probably gone but if that person is able to capture that and passes it on it is it is out there for the world at that point right  yeah and just so you know the and i want everybody to know that if you were ever to be found guilty of that offense and those offenses lead all the way up into more serious crimes you lose your phone your phone is forfeited there is no getting it back and that is a six hundred to one thousand dollar phone right and all that data so on one data dump that we had had to do for evidence there were forty six hundred pages of documentation on that phone it just tells you how much information is on there ok yeah that's a lot of the information about what you can and can't put online so what you put online i not totally private it's for the public to see and for it's there forever absolutely well thank you for coming thank you yes thank you for sharing your  expertise with us on how social media is not only affecting us now but how it will in the future and will be back after a short break with mr adams when chuck who is the director of instructional instructional technology with the peterson ship school district to talk about how the school is dealing with social media and how to effectively use it  my grandfather served in world war two spending time with him with the best memories of my life i became a physician in v a because of my grandfather so i can help others like him i can't imagine working with better doctors or more dedicated staff  filling my life's mission with the help of my team and thanks to these veterans i'm proud to be a doctor and be proud to honor my grandfather every day search v a careers to find out more been a technical director for twelve years and has worked at peters township for four years he oversees the district's educational and informational technology resources everything from your laptop computer to the networking systems that make sure everyone can access online resources thank you for being here and sharing your expertise and what is your general opinion of social media i think it depends on a lot of cases i think it is extremely valuable for students and adults as well but there's always a flip side to that coin where sometimes it doesn't always work out all that well but overall it's a positive view of social media and do you think schools have been over the years integrating our technology and social media into their schools i really do you'll see a lot of it here at the peter sonship school district as far with our communications coordinator so a lot of your parents are tied into our facebook accounts and our twitter accounts to find out you know exactly what's happening here in the district a lot of teachers have actually implemented in their classrooms where they'll post interesting topics and students are allowed to comment on that so yes i do feel like it is it is absolutely done grown within the district and really has a good footprint now  don't go on the internet like more on my phone not on the internet exactly and that's the power of social media space especially with students in high school now what we found a student spend a lot of time on social media and not so much on web pages and that's why it's a really good outlet for teachers to be able to communicate with the students because that is the avenue and the roadway that they're using to access information now so they would have their well like pages on a social media they absolutely could some of the things that school districts are creating now is instead of using public social media sites they're actually creating their own internal social media sites so they have subscriptions to companies like microsoft where they use a service called yammer that looks exactly and it's about speed of communication for us we have the same problem that you do if we do a telephone blast for school cancellation let's say that's what's happened or a water main break in a building a lot of the times parents will actually see that on social media faster than they would get it through an e mail blast or looking at our web page or getting a phone call is significantly faster and allows us to reach a lot more people than we normally would for instance if a student is staying with their uncle for the evening and there's a water main break in the school they'll be able to see it on social media where we may not have their phone number or their e mail address in order for them to be able to see that maybe school is canceled or delayed for that so it gives us a lot more avenues and a lot quicker response ye does this so in school we're not allowed to use social media but like i know our administration does and everything but on the wife i hear at school everything's blocked it currently is and a lot of that has to do with issues that are you know prevalent in today's society and one of those things the cyber bullying you know it's our responsibility in the school district to protect students in a lot of cases so we do block a lot of the social media that comes through the door here not all social media is also you know facebook twitter all of those things pinterest can be included in that and one of the examples that we always talk about with teachers is they really want to use pinterest because some really great resources were in the classroom however there are some questionable images that are out there in questionable content that is classified as maybe art photos and videos and by law i can't let that information get in the door unfortunately i can't filter that information through pinterest only allow the good stuff through and prevent the bad stuff from getting through it's the same thing with facebook and twitter i can't disallow the bad comments and the negative comments and the bullying columns and only allow the good things to come through i can only allow or disallow service so that's one of the reasons we do ok so there's that can let us go one of those blocks services i don't know if any of those apps are blocked but like what do you do with that situation a lot of the times we're actually looking at everything's going on on the networks are able to see certain things that are happening and as we see those resources start to pop up you'll see that they may work for one day or work for a couple hours and then they then they disappear unfortunately for us on the i t side of things it's almost a never ending battle as said you could see stuff on the net where does that mean you could see if we're on the wife or i and we're texting someone does that mean you can see what we're texting i can see all of your tax dollars no i can't see any i made are very nervous see those types of things in a lot of cases that information is protected by the encryption on your telephone going to specially if you're using your connection via l t e or a service provider all of that is regulated by the f c c we don't have the ability nor the right to be able to look at that type of information ok so make you feel better yeah but you can like i don't understand what can you see whenever or if you said you're checking the networks you can see what apps we're using but how we're doing on them yes  divulge too much here because then i'm going to give away all my secrets that we used to be able to protect you guys as well we don't want to we don't want you to see everything that everything that's out there so i know you guys block stuff and but if we have l t e whenever we're in school what's the point of blocking stuff before just going to go on and on l t that's a really good question and it has a lot to do with funding more than anything else and a lot of the questions i get there  well how does funding have anything to do with our internet connection but the reality is we get reimbursement for internet connection that we use here in the school district from the federal government and because we get that funding we have to comply with something that's called sofa and it's the child child information protection act where we have to be able to filter things that are considered harm harmful for students under the age of seventeen so the connection is really where that where that lies those regulations haven't caught up  to current technologies they've been around for a very long time but that's why we have to filter on our network and we we don't do anything on l t other than the fact that we're also not allowed to filter your phone yeah there was a rumor going around last year that we were blocking cell phones here in the district so much so that the f c c actually showed up and walked to the building that was a very stressful time for me but in fact we are not trying to block cell phone signals in fact we are actively based out of the administration office next to the middle school so speaking of the middle school the middle school is a lot of these are phones but the high school is very like if you don't like don't finish your homework take a picture of it have it whenever you're do it when i whenever you're at home this is a good idea actually why is a middle school like that if the high school really is a lot of that has to do with responsibility and maturity more than anything else  use that time in the middle school with a lot of our tech and teachers to educate students about what you should and shouldn't do on the internet whenever you're using resources like that in preparation for you to get ready to use that when you enter ninth grade and go into twelfth grade so we use that as a controlled environment to get them ready for this instance more than anything else it's similar to driving you know you you go for your permit before you're able to learn to drive and then you get your license  what your like the maturity level what's the difference between i mean i get what you're saying but i mean what's really difference between like a thirteen year old and fourteen year old from more than you would think but i get what you're saying a lot of the times third may not be the maturity level difference between a seventh grader and a senior when you have absolutely and certain cases yeah but it's a philosophy that we've been employing here in the district for a while and we continue to evaluate it right now we're just going to stay the course  does do you think a student could effectively use social media to like benefit their life in the future for like college or how could someone use that to benefit them to like college absolutely and this is where i wish i had social networking whenever i was young you know the stuff of stuff wasn't around when i was there i didn't have the smartphones i had the flip phones were i had to press the button to get the s and the times i wish it was there because it would allow students to actually interact with colleges with peers and with professionals for industries that they're considering to going into that is a really good thing a professional network is never too early to establish ok so what that on like the realm of that would that be like making a social media site say for sports but that be trying to get colleges to look at you that way it could be done that way could be done through their personal site so when students when students apply to colleges a lot of the times the admissions offices look for their facebook page look for their twitter account just to learn a little bit more about the students a whole rather than what's just on the application so yes anything that they set up they're becoming group members of groups learning groups linked in or in facebook those types of things really apply for a job the majority of human resources directors out there that's the first thing they do is they look at your social media they look at your facebook page and they want to see what you were all about and whether or not they actually you would fit in with their culture and their workforce they want to find out who you actually talk with what type of you know what type of connections that you have and how many resources you have access to yes that has been really helpful thank you for sharing your expertise with us today and helping us better understand why the school has such restrictions on their internet access social media crave beneficial to you in many ways but it can also be detrimental to you in the future or remember if you won't say it to someone's