Students must learn that material on the internet is public information.  Even if they think it is locked down or disseminated only to “friends,” it is not. Once something is distributed on a social networking site, it is public information.  Companies can save the information and use it for whatever purposes they desire at anytime in the future, it may be cached on websites likes the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org), or it may be forwarded onto other people.

From the perspective of a professional educator, you’d think this would be an easy problem to handle; unfortunately it isn’t.  Nowadays, web page URLs are increasingly dynamic and social networking sites are building more and more ways to filter information.  A teacher or school administrator might see something atrocious that was posted by a student on the internet, but by the time they go into work the next morning it may be moved, altered or deleted.  After some minor occurrences of students insulting faculty members online, some teachers and I were facing the very issue of how to track down and save this type of material.

I’ve decided to post a procedure to permanently capture material that a student (or anyone) has posted online:

1.       Make sure that the offending remark or comment is displayed on your computer monitor
2.       Push the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard. (Don’t worry, it won’t actually print anything.)
3.       Open up Microsoft Paint
4.       Go to the edit menu and click paste. A copy of your computer screen will be placed into them image.
5.       Click File and Save as.  Name the file and save it.  Make sure you remember the directory that you saved the image.  (If you’re technically inclined, you can save the file as a JPEG to reduce space, but really any format will do.)
6.       Find the directory in the folder that you saved it, and make sure that it worked.
7.       Close Microsoft Paint
8.       E-mail the screenshot as an attachment to the student’s parent, any parties that were insulted, and (if necessary) the principal.

I recommend that everyone try this once just to make sure that you know how to do it.

In our classes, teachers should instruct students that online speech should be treated the same as face-to-face speech.  If something is inappropriate to say out loud, it is inappropriate to type. If you said something inappropriate to 50 people, you would be in trouble.  If you use the internet to distribute something inappropriate to 50 people it is nearly the same.