February 14, 2007
Extracurricular videos roil campus
YouTube, MySpace and other websites are sprinkled with videos taken in high school classrooms around the country — often, it appears, without permission of the subjects, reports The Los Angeles Times. [via Alan Reiter's Cameraphone Report]
"Many are relatively tame — others not. One popular YouTube video called "The Angry Teacher" shows a male instructor increasingly losing his cool to a classroom of unruly students. (A search for Angry teacher on YouTube brings up dozen of such videos).
But policing these secret videos is proving a challenge for educators, who say they must balance protecting the rights of students to express themselves in this digital age with the need to shield classmates and teachers from ridicule.
"It's a gray area for us," said Malibu High Principal Mark Kelly. "We want to recognize our students' free speech rights, but on the other hand we have to assess the educational impact to the students and our school. Is this going to disrupt the education process of the school day?"
... While students are not supposed to use their phones in class, the reality is much different.
"It's very easy to conceal phones and not have teachers notice," said Sarah Paxton, a senior at Malibu High and the student representative on the school board. "Most students will use books and then have phones in their laps, and they'll text message, or you can have a sweater covering [the phone] so only the camera shows. It's not that difficult, especially if the teacher is trying to focus on the whole class."
That's what happened on one of the videos, in which students compared a popular math teacher with an unpopular substitute teacher."
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