Cyberbullying - Also An Issue

Good Morning, I recently read this article and another entitled “Schools must teach web safety” in the November/Deceember 08 edition of eSchool News. Internet safety is a criticval issue for parents and educators. We hear a lot about many of the potential online dangers facing our youth, but we tend to hear less about those dangers which young people pose to each other. With that as backdrop, I want to pass along the link to the cyberbullying curriculum which we here in Seattle are rolling out to help ensure online safety for all our students http://www.seattleschools.org/area/prevention/cbms.html The curriculum you find here is complete and useable. However, it is not done. Over the next few weeks, there will be even more wonderful student writing activities and home-school-classroom communications incorporated into it. As they are added, we will seamlessly change out the pages. We are also hoping to get some good feedback as people use the evaluation/feedback forms which are included on the web site with the materials. Even as we say that, we also know that this curriculum will never be really done. Things change too much and too fast for that. Internet safety and cyberbullying are not specifically “technology” problems. They are social-educational issues around the use of technologies. With this in mind, our development team included people with a combination of classroom, curriculum development, educational/instructional technology, bullying prevention and writing instruction backgrounds. The materials were designed to be incorporated into ongoing bullying prevention programs. However, the individual Lessons were created to be flexible enough shorter classroom meeting-type settings or to be used in longer classrooms periods. If they are used in longer classroom settings, they would also fit nicely into existing Technology, Health and Language Arts units. They can also be used as stand-alones within an Exploratory-type setting. Unlike many of the other materials which are available online, these Lessons were also designed 1) around our WA state standards, 2) by educators, 3) with teachers in mind: all the information and materials which a classroom teacher needs to present a Lesson are self-contained. Teachers who may think of themselves as less-than-tech-savvy will be able to use them as easily as high-end tech users. We are sharing and piloting these materials – and plan to incorporate feedback suggestions over the coming months. The work, thus far, has been funded by a grant from the Qwest Foundation with additional dollars made available through our SPS Prevention-Intervention programs. Along with the great curriculum materials, we also have educator and parent training materials available. Ideally, we’d also have funds to do some real, systematic roll-out training. We hope to be able to expand on this core from cyberbullying to a more complete internet safety curriculum. The plan is to ultimately have a 3-part set of materials - cybersafety, cybercitizenship and the cyberbullying - like those you see here. This will take time and resources. We have some folks who are interested in expanding on the current MS /JrH cyberbullying into both higher and lower grades. (I think that that may happen quite a bit. We can then take input, vet it, massage it, and coordinate all the look-and-feel.) In the meantime, we’ve also been doing a lot of training for adults – administrators, counselors, teachers and parents. A lot of it is awareness raising; there is also a lot of idea and resource sharing. Please feel free to share this information. If you have any questions, please let me know and, of course, any and all feedback will also be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Mike Carpe diem! http://www.seattleschools.org/area/prevention/cbms.html http://cyberbullying.seadesk.seattleschools.org 206-252-0799

Posted By: mdonlin, 2008-11-17 4:43 PM