Cyberbullying & Online Student Safety:

Giga-Smart in a Wired World

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As our world goes more and more high tech, your students need to be ready. This blog issue has a lot of fantastic strategies to prevent cyberbullying  and promote students' online safety. Hopefully, using these strategies will help prepare your students to live in a wired, wired world.

Strategies to Prevent Cyberbullying

and Promote Student Safety Online

Teach Students: Don't Text and Drive

The key line, shown in Poster #165 at left is: "Your phone called. It said 'Hang up and drive."

You can have your students make a poster using this line, or you can just use this device verbally. Hopefully, this catchy line will impact your young drivers.

Grades by Facebook

This intervention helps students realize that problematic postings can come back to haunt them forever.

Begin by asking students what kind of content is posted on Facebook and other social networking sites. Allow them to note that students sometimes post about partying, substance abuse, personal problems, and so on.

Next, ask the group who views the content. Assist students to realize that content may be viewed by colleges and universities, and that some colleges, universities– and even employers– are requiring candidates to give them access to all their social networking pages prior to being accepted or hired.

Help students to realize that problematic posts can negate the value of good grades when it comes time to be accepted at college, or hired for a job.

Prevent Cyberbullying: Your Anti-Social Network

Write the words "cyberbullying" on the board, and ask students to discuss what the term means. Assist students to identify strategies to cope with, reduce, or eliminate the cyberbullying they may experience. For example, students can block bullying "friends" on Facebook.

Give this guideline to help students recognize cyberbullying: "When it's no longer social networking but has become anti-social networking, that's cyberbullying, and means it's time to find a new network."

We All Work in a Wired, Wired World

Inform students that nearly all jobs have a high tech component, from clocking in on an electronic time card system, to operating a PDA, to using a barcode scanner, more and more work increasingly includes technology.

Put two columns on the board, then ask students to list jobs not normally associated with high tech. Put their responses in the first column. Next, ask students to name how each low tech job might still require high tech skills. Put their answers in the second column.

For example, waitresses may need to use computers and PDAs to key in orders, scan credit cards, and tabulate bills. Assist the class to realize that almost all jobs require tech skills because we are increasingly living in a high tech world.

Dude, What's Your Cyber Q?

Test students' Cyber Q– "Q" is a shortened version of "IQ"– by asking them to define high tech terms like these: PDA, Phishing, ISM, MB, pixel, SSL. They will need to know these terms to survive on our high tech planet.

(Answers: PDA is Personal Digital Assistant like a Blackberry; Phishing means a scammer is "fishing" for your passwords and confidential information; ISM is a high paying job of Information Systems Manager, and he or she oversees computer networks; MB is a unit of measurement that describes the size of a file or data; pixel refers to the composition of things like a photograph or monitor; SSL is short for Secure Socket Layer, and indicates whether a web page has been made secure for credit card transactions and other private activity.)