Just as Lagrange88 brought up the legal issues with
cyberbullying, I am thinking of cyberbullying cases happening at places outside
of class blog or class blackboard. For example, individual students can set up
their own blog or group blog with bullying content; individual students can
send personal emails to attack other students; students can post mean comments
on Facebook, twitter, or other social network. It will be difficult for
teachers to monitor these online behaviors if the blogs are not for class use
purpose. As Lagrange88 has pointed out in the article, schools can be sued for
violating students’ free speech right if schools try to discipline the
students.
Therefore teachers need to model for students how to respect and tolerate
each other, stop bullying immediately when spotting any bullying behavior. Most
importantly, teachers need to lecture and discuss openly about bullying/
cyberbullying behaviors, as well as creating a contract with students regarding
the responsible use of technology.
The Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use offers some good resources for both educators and parents to deal with cyberbullying both in and out of the school setting. http://www.csriu.org/cyberbully/
ReplyDeletePersonal sites are definitely one means used by cyberbullies. Social networking sites such as Facebook and My Space come to mind. While I was googling cyberbullying, I found:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.facebook.com/stopcyberbullying
http://www.cyberbullyalert.com/blog/2008/10/popular-websites-used-for-cyber-bullying/
https://pinterest.com/sherrycrofut/cyberbullying-social-networking/
I feel that even though it is just as tragic for cyberbullying to occur on social networking sites, the schools will probably not be able to do much about it. With a school related blog, such as this, the teacher is able to monitor what is going on and take appropriate action for inappropriate posts. However, children are not required to have a social networking page, and considering it has nothing to do with a school, there isn't much the schools can do. It is unfortunate because children might not see anyone else to go to, but the legal aspects would get really tricky with the 'freedom of speech' excuse for cyberbullying.
ReplyDeleteSo true. I know Facebook has privacy settings that would at least protect a student in that no one could post hurtful things on that student's wall, but cyber bullies could still post hurtful things on their own statuses and walls. I am not familiar enough with MySpace to know if it has a similar privacy feature.
ReplyDelete