Students and teachers will no longer face the challenge of continuously changing their Facebook status updates while in schools in New Brunswick.

The Department of Education has unplugged the popular social networking site from teachers and students during school hours.

A provincewide Facebook ban took effect at the beginning of this week.

Valerie Kilfoil, a department spokeswoman, said the new policy was created because school districts complained that frequent Facebook use was disruptive to the classroom.

"It all ties into the use of technology in the schools. It must always be linked to educational outcomes and as well the department always has to be vigilant about privacy and pupil-protection issues so because Facebook is a social network, it was determined that it did not fit into the educational outcomes, in terms of the use of technology," she said.

Kilfoil said so far, feedback from teachers about the ban has been positive.

Gregg Ingersoll, director of education for School District 2 in the Moncton area, said the department has been monitoring the websites students visit. He said he noticed too many people signing on to Facebook during school hours.

"So the department began tracking the number of hits they were getting on [Facebook] during the day," Ingersoll said. "It was substantive of the number of hits happening during the school day. So that's what prompted the department to look into the possibility of blocking the site."

Ingersoll says the ban stretches from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Anyone still hanging around the halls after that is free to view their Facebook accounts. But that doesn't apply to personal devices such as BlackBerrys or laptops, which still have access to all sites.

Facebook has already been restricted in almost half of the departments inside the New Brunswick government.

Individual departments have been given the flexibility to make their own rules on the social networking site, but the departments of Business New Brunswick, agriculture and aquaculture, fisheries, health, supply and services, natural resources and tourism have all clamped down on use of Facebook.