Mike Masnick has a story where the main issue is free speech rights of students but the subplot interests me as much – the fact that a school is constantly monitoring its students’ tweets, even on their own time and equipment:
The principal at Garrett High School claims their system tracks all the tweets on Twitter when a student logs in, meaning even if he did tweet it from home their system could have recognized it when he logged in again at school.
I’m not entirely sure what they mean here by it “could have recognized it when he logged in again at school,” but it seems clear that the school was aggressively monitoring social networking activity, and chose to expel the kid because of his decision to express himself.
Read more on TechDirt.
And if you’re upset about such monitoring of students’ behavior, remind yourself that this is what you get when you insist schools deal with cyberbullying and no one really stands up for students’ free speech rights and privacy rights.