I get a helpful newsletter every week or so in my email. Education Tech News is aimed at mostly secondary-level teachers and administrators, but I glean some useful things out of it once in a while. Today’s newsletter featured an article about a teacher who has been suspended, with pay, pending an investigation. He has been accused of political blogging on company time.
There are several areas of concern here. The teacher in question, Jason Levin, created a web page and blog as a way to not only present his political views, but used it as a sort of call to action. The school received hundreds of complaints about his views and call to action, and specifically about his suggestion that anyone following his cause engage in identity theft through the taking of petition signatures and identifying information.
The school district, and the state teacher’s accrediting body, are both investigating, although there is no criminal investigation. At issue is whether Mr. Levin wrote his blogs and maintained his website from his school-owned computer and on the school’s time.
The fact is, many of us do personal things while on work time, whether it is a phone call or two to schedule an appointment, checking personal email, looking up directions to the restaurant we want to go to for dinner, reading the news, checking the scores on a day baseball game, we all do it to some extent. And I think generally a little of that kind of thing is fine. Studies have shown that those things actually increase morale and sharpen productivity for most people. But if you’re running an entire campaign from the comfort of your at-work computer, there is going to be some question of how you spend your time.
I imagine I’ll see an update to this story in my next newsletter, which I’ll be looking forward to.