Bebo?

Flicked past BBC Breakfast telly this morning. There was a chap talking about "Bebo" and a woman about "social networking" within schools. Only caught the very end of it. She said she was currently working with a school in Lancashire - anyone on here. Is this something we should be ready for, before management get wind and come at us with their own idea ;)

Andy.

We were asked to block bebo.com after a child protection 'incident'.
I think anyone can join, and doesn't need to be a member of the school.

Advice: Block Bebo ASAP

So many issues, people can post porn on their profiles (incident here regarding that), anyone can join from anywhere and then pretend to be someone and start chatting to the students. MySpace is the same.

Issues that can be you wouldnt want it your School and easy to stop - just block it.

I have to admit, I've never heard of it but it's been blocked by our LEA so no problem there :)

Funnily enough, it has here too!

Andy

Our LEA dont block it, but we do with our anti virus/firewall servers.

Yeh I caught about 20 seconds of it.

The guy off there was saying it was safe because kids can have it so only people they allow can see their profiles.
What he didn't say was any pervert could pretend to be a child, befriend them etc etc.

The other person on the program was saying they used it in their school to do international learning, ie study the lives and have friends in Praguay.

Same as everything, it's only as safe and good as the people who use it.

there's also a "mebo" and an "eebo" (sp?) - same thing.

"meebo" is a web-based instant messenger for MSN/Yahoo/AOL/Jabber/GTalk. Haven't a clue what eebo is.

We've blocked bebo, meebo and so many others.
We're running Websense, so using reporting tools in conjunction with AB Tutor control to identify websites to be aded - got a nice big list so far :D

We've blocked it as we've already had one complaint from a parent about a page on there to do with one kid bullying another (All done out of school though so not much else we can do).

We block all these types of sites now as they all do pretty much the same thing and all seem to end up in some form of online "bullying" (based on a wide range of definitions). The biggest difference I saw with Bebo was that you had to be invited to join a school by a member of that school, making it very hard to monitor what was going on. Definitely not what our school network is for.

This may be of interest for doing the same thing in a more structured way:

http://learnerblogs.org/

I can't say it won't end up in "Gaz'n'pete sez that Hayleys a proper slag n there rite", but at least it'll have moderated comments etc.