Message to mom and dad: you can’t just take your child’s computer away if you suspect/know that they are doing some wrong or inappropriate on their computers because then they will not be able to complete their school work!  Even if they are mostly using that new macbook pro to chat with friends, browse facebook, and look at youtube videos, not allowing them access to it can possibly hurt their learning.  Since computers and education tend to be intimately intertwined, trying to “make” students use their expensive machines for mostly school-related work becomes a difficult task, especially when the students attend a school that has a school-wide laptop program.  With this increased use of the internet, the possibility of getting bullied online obviously increases.

During 2008-2010, a teacher friend (high school librarian) at my school would conduct workshops/presentations on cyberbullying and we had lots of discussions around this issue back then during our commute to work.  She was a woman in her late 50s who suddenly got really involved in internet bullying because many of the students would hang out in her library and send out inappropriate/hurtful messages to others.  She understood the importance of this topic, but, at the time, I thought it wasn’t really necessary to discuss it because I thought cyberbullying wasn’t happening in my class or around school until one of my students told me about some of his former friends who used to threaten him online.  Since this type of bullying was done via the internet, it was not overt so it was perhaps more insidious since we couldn’t clearly see it with our own eyes such as we did in the past with playground bullying.

Now, however, cyberbullying does not seem to happen as much as it did during the mid to late 2000s (right?).  This trend has seemed to shift perhaps because many people have been the victim of it in some capacity or another and/or perhaps people have become more immune to it because people are more open about their privacy now.  With facebook, hi5, and other websites being so ubiquitous these days, and that people are posting more revealing pics (e.g., half-naked, on the toilet, in compromising positions, etc) of themselves online, it seems that we are not so shocked anymore when we come across them as we did in the past.  As for rumors being spread online or through sms, they don’t seem to cause or create much havoc anymore among kids because they are often just ignored or they can be easily debunked.