Student Safety/Bullying

So today's class topic was mostly CyberBullying. We went through several case studies and talked about what the person bullying did properly and what he might have done differently to help protect himself.

The case studies clearly involved situations that were very traumatic for the person being bullied. A school has the absolute responsibility to educate its students about bullying of all forms, including online. Parents must also talk with their children about it. The problem here, though, is just like with the copyright issues. It's not really anything different than has been happening since forever, it's just the scope that the internet allows. And also in the case of cyberbullying, there is the potential that the damaging videos or pictures or text messages may never go away. Once a picture is posted on for example FaceBook, anybody can copy and save it to their own computer and it will just never go away. It's not like a harmful handwritten note than can be torn up and thrown away.

Another point that the videos and case studies we reviewed in class missed is degrees of severity. The case-studies were so over the top and obvious examples of horrible behavior. But what about the occasional bullying, maybe posting a picture on your FaceBook of somebody you don't like...maybe you take it down after a week, but how many dozes have seen the picture? What have they done with it?

ISB's MS AUP definitely does not specifically address this issues deeply enough. And how deeply should it address the issue? If a student creates a FaceBook page at home that bullies another student, is it the school's place to step in? I think for sure it is, especially if that FaceBook page is accessed even one time on school property or if students are talking about it on school grounds.

I came across this website on cyberbullying, stopcyberbullying.org. I like how the website breaks down the message for different age groups, and also offers information for parents, teachers, and even law-enforcement.

I think the more students use social networking sites, educate themselves, and receive consistent messages from parents and teachers about proper use and cyberbulling, the more successful we will be at educating them to not only be good online citezens, but in general good people.