| Facebook has proven to be invaluable as a broadcast tool for school
| organizations and you can have closed groups which are open by
| invitation only. I.e. my son's marching band does most of their
| communications via Facebook including posting videos of competitions,
| notices of practices and rehearsals, etc. To do that with e-mail would
| be a real pain in the butt.
|

They could have a website. They could talk to each other.
Facebook, in that case, is being used because the school
faculty are just too lazy to set up a website. There's no
excuse for setting up children with an advertising company.
If they had a website the kids could also learn a bit about
doing webpages. I'm not denying that Facebook can be useful.
I'm saying it's sleazy and fundamentally disempowering; not
a good example to set for kids.

It wasn't so long ago that people were playing with having
their own websites on space offered by their ISPs. Now,
just a few years later, most people think of the Internet
as a "consumer" service. Just as kids are growing up in
malls instead of in neighbors' back yards or in the town square,
they're also growing up in a commercial version of the Internet
that doesn't belong to them. You seem to be technically
sophisticated. Why not help the kids set up their own website?
They can learn HTML, how to manage a server, digital
graphics.... and it can be whatever they want, with no
corporate spying.

I have a friend who's a grade school teacher and is
being pressured to start a Twitter account, in order to
announce "stuff" daily to kids and parents, so that the
parents can feel involved. The lack of both imagination
and integrity in such a directive is pitiful.