Cyberbullying

90% of the kids seem to ignore it and not be good digital citizens to stand up to the bully and say something. You must teach and address digital citizenship in the classroom.

I tried finding statistics on how many deaths have been connected to cyber bullying, but could not find any.

I wanted to write this post because as I was reading the news today I saw yet another young student decided to take their life because they were bullied online.

Educators, parents, adults, mentors, and everyone on the internet must teach young people to be good citizens online and be models of that. After reading about the suicide I found another article that showed some online users who were being models and I had faith in the online community. They ignored the harmful comments and tried to rid them of their ignorance. Then the person who posted the photo and harsh comments apologized and said they had learned a lot. It made me smile and wish this ending happened more than suicide.

This xkcd comic called sticks and stones sums it up well. The rollover text says that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words make me think I deserved it." The words you say online make a difference.

Here is another post that relates to cyber bullying. It sums up that killing yourself should never be an option. 

Schools need a system in place to address bullying and cyberbullying. An interesting solution I read about is that students can send in anonymous text messages to teachers and administrators. That way a student is not seen tattling in the office just to get further abuse for tattling. Almost all students have phones or mobile devices and are on them all the time. People will just think that they are texting a friend not a teacher. This could be used to report cyberbullying and I think it would be possible to include links or copies of online conversation in the message. This could allow adminstrators real time live reports of bullying as well and stop a fight as soon as possible. It is an interesting solution to the bullying problem that should be explored. To find out more please read this article.

If you want ideas about how to address this issue and what resources you can use please see the following posts.

Digital Citizenship
Digital Citizenship lecture from technology conference