School officials in Howard County, Md., say they want to take advantages of social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, to communicate more effectively with their communities and open up a new range of learning opportunities for students and teachers, the Baltimore Sun reports.
Incorporating social media into daily life is nothing new for people in Howard County, including students and teachers at the schools, but the school board hopes to take a more proactive approach to the use of social media. They want to, for example, establish more frequent and informal two-way communication with parents of kids in their schools. Board members changed the title of their social media policy from “Acceptable Use of Technology and Social Media” to “Responsible Use of Technology and Social Media” as a way of underscoring the recognition of social media as a tool that can be used effectively in classrooms and board rooms.
The new plan allows access to social networks in the schools, provided teachers have reviewed the sites for age appropriateness and relatedness to the curriculum. Students will also receive somewhat heightened training in how to steer clear of cyberbullying, which is another issue about social media entirely.
Krista Roadifer, a school counselor at Chief Umtuch Middle School in Battle Ground, Wash., said kids bring cyberbullying issues to school every day. “It does disrupt the day,” the Columbian quoted her as saying. “They aren’t focused on learning. They’re worried about what was posted online about them.”
Cases of teen suicide from cyberbullying have also sprung up in news reports lately, most recently of an English girl who was told drink bleach by a bully on Ask.fm.
School officials in some places are advising parents to monitor the use of social media by their children and cancel it if necessary. Good luck with that! The most effective strategy, I think, for dealing with cyberbullying is not to cancel kids’ Internet access, but rather, to
- Not reply
- Save the evidence
- Do a print screen of the online conversation
- Block the bully
- Tell an adult
That last one may be the most difficult, especially if the only adult kids can go to is their parent. Howard County will provide cyberbullying instruction, but one thing that’s really needed is a resource person in the school for kids to talk to when they don’t want to bring up cyberbullying with their parents.
Most kids think that telling their parents might get their Internet access cancelled, and that’s probably the most predictable knee-jerk reaction from most of the parents in the US. But that may end up teaching kids to be reactionary. My advice, if a kid told me about cyberbullying, would be to follow the first four, or maybe five, steps above. This would have the effect, I think, of educating the child about the seriousness of the Internet.
Despite the fact that many great sites exist, there’s also a murky underworld of not-so-enriching sites—and then, there are sites that are completely disruptive to kids’ lives in that they foster or even encourage, sometimes in covert ways, cyberbullying. We’ve reported on a few of these, but nobody can possibly monitor all the sources.
The best anyone can do is to monitor kids’ activity to the extent possible and within boundaries. If suspicious sites are noticed, have a chat with the kid who accessed them.
Nobody wants to stop kids from chatting with friends—they were born to chat—and nobody wants to stop them from exploring the wonders of this world. All that wonderful stuff is out there on the Internet. If kids understand what the point is, I think they’ll agree that using the Internet and social media responsibly, as the Howard County Board of Education put it, makes for the best online experience for everyone.
