By Barbara Soderlin

Remember when social networking was driving around town, looking for a party? And if you found a party, and took some pictures, they were Polaroids, or you had to go to a film shop to get them developed. Teachers and principals didn’t know what you were up to, unless maybe you got in enough trouble the police were involved.

Now school officials find themselves in the awkward role of police, as kids post too-personal information, party pictures, suicidal poetry and more on their Facebook and MySpace pages. This story from Education Week explores how some schools have handled that role.

Many try not to go actively looking for signs of students behaving badly, but feel obligated to address the issue when evidence turns up.

Here are five tips the magazine offers for how schools can responsibly deal with problem behavior online:

1. Establish a policy for dealing with incidents in which students break school rules and their inappropriate behavior is showcased publicly on social-networking sites.

2. Outline clear guidelines for administrators that spell out how schools should discipline students based on information garnered from social-networking sites, and let parents and students know about those rules.

3. Educate students about online-safety issues and how to use sites such as Facebook and MySpace responsibly.

4. Have a policy in place for dealing with cyber bullying.

5. If teachers are using social-networking sites for educational purposes, they should establish clear guidelines for how they intend to communicate with students via those sites.