At least one district in Iowa is dealing with an increase in cyberbullying reports since an increasing number of students bring devices such as laptop computers to school, the Sioux City Journal reports.
“A lot of the challenges of cyberbullying happen outside school buildings and school houses,” the paper quoted Sioux City schools Superintendent Paul Gausman as saying. “The repercussions occur inside our buildings, though.”
School officials started noticing a few years ago that “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) policies have a tendency to promote cyberbullying. Providing students with Internet access at school gives bullies among them another place to do their bullying. Policies for bullying need to keep up—and in many, many schools, they do—as an April 2012 report in the New Haven (Conn.) Register observed:
[The BYOD] policy … bans using the devices for cyberbullying, and adds that students’ electronics can be searched if “there is reasonable suspicion that a school rule, board policy or state or federal law has been violated.” The policy also says the Board of Education is not responsible for any devices getting lost or damaged or for any monetary charges connected to students’ use of the electronics.
Seeing the forest, not just the trees
As schools struggle to find a happy medium between allowing students to use smartphones, computers, tablets, and whatever devices come along in the future for everything on the Internet and allowing them to use the devices for nothing of any real value, cyberbullying has to be kept under control.
On the one hand, letting kids use Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks that will enable cyberbullying can be stopped while students are in school, as long as they have to connect to the Internet through the school’s firewall. I don’t support this kind of filtering through the use of technology, because there are at least a few good, educational pages on Facebook, and I’ve never seen responses come to questions I’ve had as quickly as they do on Twitter.
Social media is how people become engaged in their communities and in the world these days, and restricting access to this kind of community involvement by students just because of the fear of misuse is short-sighted, I think. Better to allow the access and teach students about the proper use of technology.
And after the material in those “becoming a good net citizen” classes has been mastered, which should include not only cyberbullying but bullying in general, we can hope the dropping of an impenetrable curtain between students and certain websites will be unnecessary.
In the ultimate analysis, students are going to use technology, as they should, since schools ought to hold their mission of promoting lifelong learning above all others. It’s hard to deny that technology has enhanced our ability to find information quickly. Many analysts are predicting that just about every student in every school will have access to some form of Internet communication by 2015. That’s not very far in the future, and we need to make our policies ready, especially those that deal with cyberbullying.
Although BYOD and similar programs provide opportunities for cyberbullying, I’m reminded of the words of the Federation President in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who declared, “Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing.” Technology, Internet access, online classes—all are great things that have an infinite range of possibilities. Let’s not destroy this progress by using them for cyberbullying.