How witnesses react can make a BIG difference in stopping cyberbullying and making it hurt less.
It can be hard speaking out when cyberbullying happens for a whole pile of reasons, but what you say and do is really important.
Well, it happened: we had a parenting fail when it comes to technology.
I read an interesting Facebook post the other day, written by a teenaged girl. She said quite firmly that it was important for parents to not have their children’s passwords, for their phone or social media accounts. She talked about building trust and how insisting on knowing your kids’ passwords is the first step to them sneaking around online and getting involved in things you wish they wouldn’t.
Using oral, written, visual, and digital texts, students are expected individually and collaboratively to be able to:
Comprehend and connect (reading, listening, viewing)
Half of Canadian youth aged 16 to 20 have been sent a sext (a nude, partly nude or sexy photo) that they didn’t ask for. Whether you call them sexts, nudes, naked selfies or just pics, if you receive an intimate image like this, it’s your job to make the right choice about the sender’s privacy. There is no excuse to forward a sext that someone sent you.
Finding programming that the entire family enjoys, with kids at all ages, can sometimes be difficult. When the kids were little, it was great when we found a cartoon that we all enjoyed. The same challenge has continued as the kids have gotten older. With preteens and teens, their television tastes change (I have a child who loves a good fantasy action show or movie, and another who much prefers comedy). However, we have discovered one type of programming we all enjoy: reality shows. Especially those with a competitive element to them (although transformative TV is popular, too).
Good-quality video games offer lots of benefits to children and teens.
It’s ironic that as computers and other communications technology have become more accessible to the general public over the last thirty years, they have actually become less accessible to a segment of the population, one to whom access is everything: people with disabilities. More ironic still is that the history of communications technology is intimately tied to the drive to integrate people with disabilities more fully into society.
Note: this is the fifth in a series of blogs looking at the history and future of Web 2.0. The user-participation culture of Web 2.0 has begun to change the worlds of music, movies, animation, games and even encyclopedias, but in no area does the change promise to be as deep and fundamental as in the world of news. While other aspects of user-created content blur the line between authors and audiences, the line remains there: it still takes tremendous skill and effort to make a mashup or a fan movie, even if Web 2.0 has made those things easier to distribute. Some have suggested, though, that it will change journalism in a much more radical way – perhaps altering our idea of what journalism is entirely.