It is always great to hear about teachers addressing networking and safety in their classes, and doing so in a meaningful way.

When an un-knowledgeable student is the expert in the family, that’s a bit unsettling… but what I find even more unsettling is when that student, as the expert, has full reign to do what they want online, and there is no dialogue between them and their parents.

Your final comment about what a concern cyberbullying is solidifies my stance that we need to be online with students. That said, I totally respect your informed decision not to ‘friend’ your students on Facebook… We don’t have an individual obligation or a necessity to be there/everywhere online with them, and you probably have more of an impact in educating your students about online safety and cyberbullying than most teachers and parents do.

Way to go Lesley!

I also show them the section of the user agreement that states that while you own any content you put on FB, FB asserts the right to using it pretty much any way they see fit.

I ask them how they would feel if their grandma were to see their FB page. I stress that ‘what goes online stays online.’

One activity I do is to pass out current news articles about Internet safety or cyber bullying and ask the students what the problem in the story is and how they could prevent it from happening to them.

For the most part they are eager to hear what I have to say and many comment that they will change the way they present themselves online.
I don’t accept students as friends on FB. I really don’t want to put myself in the position of having to do something about an activity a student may reveal online.

Last year in our school the counsellors reported that the #1 problem that students came to them about was cyberbullying. Scary!

ps Classroom 2.0 is not what I thought it would be…funny how you idealise what something will be like only to find the reality is something completely different….I blame that on computers…..
it is 7.30 pm here cold and raining…

My experience with students’ ideas of ‘friendship’ online is that Grade 6 and under seem to relate it to real-life friends and as students get older they see it simply as a connection. There is some teaching that can go on here, isn’t there?

I don’t consider myself any closer to Facebook friends that are students, and while I totally agree with you that the student sending the message to me did not make a distinction that time, I have not received an inappropriate message of any kind since… lesson learned?

As for the bullying being caught ‘after the fact’ you are correct, yet without an adult presence how far would it have gone before an intervention? In my first two examples the bullying could have been considerably worse if teachers were not there… and how many more students would have been drawn into the mud-slinging because there was no one there to interject? It goes back to my cartoon, often when the adult is unaware, the bully wins.

So yes Silvana, we must agree to disagree. I know that there are teachers and other adults that do not act appropriately online, but in my eyes, if we aren’t there too, then they are the ones that get to influence and lead by example. Computers and the internet are not going away, so I think we should be there role modelling what is appropriate, just as we do in school hallways, and shopping malls and other public places.

ps
Your busy schedule makes me more appreciative of the time you have taken to comment and respond. No apologies necessary.
Thank you!

ps
can I also take this opportunity to apologise for my typos on the previous post. I decided quite a while back that I would only ever multi task on here, that is do several other tasks not just sit in front of a screen….so yes my point, I was cooking dinner, doing the laundry and writing class notes, as well as responding to your post so hmmm typos happen!!!!

I’d like to take a moment to respond specifically to Silvana’s comment:

I’m not sure that teacher presence on Facebook will prevent bullying, rather that it will encourage more appropriate behaviour in a very public place. It will also give students some role models that they can look up to and perhaps even turn to if they are bullied.

I’m not sure about ‘bluffing’, but I know that in schools we encourage friends not to push and shove each other in our halls because it can be misinterpreted as bullying and can lead to more open aggression… And so if a kid is ‘bluffing’ online, I’d rather get rid of that public behaviour as well.

I am not advocating for outward ‘policing’ of Facebook, but rather that teachers have a right to be there, and a right to accept students as friends (if they are invited and if they choose to do so). That said, if we are there, we have a responsibility to act appropriately and deal with behaviour that we come across and deem inappropriate.

As for adult predators, I think this is an issue that we should all warn students about and we can do that best with an online presence ourselves. Again, if we are online, and parents are too, then students (our children) may not be afraid to discuss online concerns with us. If they are there behind parent’s backs and behind teacher’s backs, they certainly won’t look to these adults when they have an online issue.

I’m not pretending that teachers being on Facebook is going to rid cyberspace of bullying or other issues, but I am certain that if we aren’t online engaging meaningfully with students, then we are counting on their peers to lead them… and that’s when online safety becomes a legitimate concern.

Dysfunctional activities are born of some hurt or unfulfilled frozen need from the dark reaches of one’s past…. rarely connected to the present situation, but of course impacting it. So our responsibility as educators does much deeper than dealing with just the present reality.