I prefer the “walled garden” for a lot of things. What I *like* is to have it both ways. So what is the possibility of only having the chat room open at times that YOU control? Is it important to have it open 24/7? Can you have a moderator for times you can’t supervise on-line yourself? However you proceed, you will need to do some training! What is and is not acceptable, and also what to do if you get involved in something that is not acceptable. I am wondering why they want to do all this on your server! In my experience, they were fairly content to use the school software for academic work and used the social networking software for the social stuff. MOSTLY because a) Big Brother (me) was watching and b) all their friends were not on the school system, so they went elsewhere. Of course I was as a small school (60-80 per grade level). That surely made a difference.

We have applied a patch that permits students to IM with teachers only. If we have teachers who want their satudents to be able to IM with each other, we will think about reverting to the old behavior.

We simply found that the students’ IMing (is that a word?) was often inappropriate for a school site and was mostly unrelated to instruction.

Where I live and teach, we take the view, “Better safe than sorry.” We really have to operate this way. This may not be true of your school district, of course.

1. It’s going to increase their engagement with the content. (As you note.)

2. They’re going to IM or MySpace anyway and talk to each other how ever they want anyway.

3. You should tell them that you have logs of the chats, so if anything happens they know they are responsible for what they said. This gives you the benefit of being able to keep an eye on them not only for language and behavior, but also to see what their points of confusion are about the material being learned.