This month’s article follows up on an article published earlier this year that discussed the free speech rights of teachers who use their own home computers and internet systems to send email, create personal websites, and participate on social networking sites (see, “Not So Personal Websites,” July 2007).

A rash of recent cases involving student use of the popular video website YouTube makes this topic worth visiting again. Where the earlier article described a student teacher’s posting of her own photo to her own personal website (and the repercussions that followed), the recent cases involve a very different behavior: student posting of suggestive, disparaging, and in some cases, threatening videos to YouTube about their teachers.

The following is just a sampling of recent cases involving students and YouTube postings:

Example 1: An unidentified person records a teacher as she attends a fifth-grade graduation ceremony, filming the teacher’s face, down the length of her body, then zooming in on her bottom. The video is posted to YouTube accompanied by the Van Halen song “Hot for Teacher.” The teacher is made aware of the video, complains to YouTube, and the video ultimately is taken down, but not before being viewed 200,000 times. The video has now resurfaced on the social networking site, MySpace.