Switching From Defense To Offense In The Fight Against Cyberbullies Is “BLOG” another four-letter word we would prefer not to hear in the halls of our school?
Michael Rhodes, High Meadows School, Roswell Georgia

Just Google “cyberbully” and you will find pages of links to good advice regarding what you should know, and more importantly, what parents and teachers should know in order to protect children.  There is no reason for this article to reiterate some best practice blurbs when dozens of sites are already dedicated to doing just that (e.g. www.cyberbully.org).  However, I cannot over-emphasize that the first and most important defense is to make sure parents are aware of these recommendations and recognize the many forms of cyber-talk and cyber-space as a very real threat to their child.

A problem schools face is that no matter what kind of defenses we put up—whether it be computer and Internet policies that every student, parent, and staff member has to sign, firewalls that block sites like “MySpace” or “Facebook” and filter content, more sophisticated firewalls that can keep up with those student who are able to proxy around the firewall, making sure teachers are on the lookout, tracking all Internet activity, or actually looking at the logs—most students have full access when they are off campus and most parents do not, nor should they, have the technical skills to stop access from home computers. 

I have a fair amount of technical skill, and I find the task daunting. Short of unplugging the Internet, I have very few foolproof solutions to the problem.  It is important to remember, though, that the problem isn’t a new one, and it isn’t all bad. Bullying has occurred on playgrounds for centuries, and we still like the idea of having a recess or allowing social interaction among schoolchildren.  When these students become adults, cyber-talk is going to be a very real and growing part of most work environments—indeed, it already—so how is blocking access a good solution for the learning environment?

Do not misinterpret me: I am all for blocking and filtering the Internet at home and at school, and I do block any “social site” that I am aware of on our school’s firewall. These sites are not inherently bad.  However, for a naive youth they are unproductive, unsafe, and uncontrollable, and for the not-so-naive youth they can be easily put to use for inappropriate, as well as destructive, school activity.

As educators, we should be proactive in guiding our youth. We should keep our defenses, but add some offense. We might do this by creating our own grade level “Community Space” and having students discuss issues on it. We could secure it, monitor it, and use it to help guide.  This could be as simple as a text blog or as elaborate as anything a site like “MySpace” has to offer (though I personally would not entertain the idea of allowing live chat on a school hosted site).  For a small school, like mine, you could develop your own code and host your own site and have total control.  If you are in a larger school or school system, first check and find out what is already available (many systems already have some logging functionality in place), you could look at having it hosted by a third party for pennies per student.

Some suggestions for success:

1. Start young. Fourth grade is not too early, and hopefully not too late. If students don’t already have experience with cyber-neighborhoods, great! They haven’t already developed bad habits. A controlled cyberspace for a 10th grader isn’t a waste of time, but it will probably be too late for impacting guidance.
2. Make it real. Don’t just set it up so kids can go to a computer lab and practice blogging back and forth. Do not use teacher/subject related blogs where the content is confined and directed more to school curriculae. Have it dedicated to social conversation.  Monitor posts and comments. For example, ours is set up so posts and comments have to be approved before they are visible. Let as much as possible through.  If the content is inappropriate, try to edit the post, leaving the “spirit” of the message, along with a note to all readers that the content was altered, instead of deleting the post.  Guide, don’t reprimand, when posts step over the line—these are the opportunities we were hoping for when creating the site.  Our school follows the Positive Discipline[6]philosophies when working with children, and a large part of this approach is the weekly classroom meeting.  So our discussion portals (another term that can be used instead of blog) are just an extension of the very productive conversations we are already involving our students in during the class meetings.
3. Section it off.  Don’t allow 8th graders and 4th graders to use the same portal, as tolerance of what is appropriate should not be the same for both age groups.
4. Secure it.  Distribute unique user/password access, no open registration page, and use SSL (the latter is not absolutely necessary, but I would hate for someone to sniff out the content and names as it is running down the information highway).  Make the first screen the login screen, let no part of the site be open to the public. Discuss with students the importance of keeping their login credentials private.  They must understand that a login is not something that is “theirs” to share, because allowing access to the site affects the whole community, not just the individual user.
5. No anonymous posts or comments.  The login requirement will enforce this.  You can allow students to access to their profiles for changing passwords, etc., but do not allow them to change their display name (which should be their actual name not some made up handle).
6. Have an essential agreement that you develop with the group.  For example, in class discussions our students agreed that if they want to voice an issue they should use names.  So no statements like, “I don’t like the way some people are always …” but instead “ I don’t like the way Billy Thornton, Jill Frog, and Joe Nobody always…”.  The latter might seem more likely to cause dispute, but having the students agree that this is the rule and purpose of the “discussion portal” takes a lot of the bite out of it, and the resulting comments and discussion are much more productive.
7. Inform parents.  With the monitoring of each comment and post comes the necessity of not having immediate responses. Immediate responses are something children—and adults—are getting accustomed to, but do not work in this scenario.  Have parents help by not letting their children switch the medium for their discussions.  Discourage them from picking up the phone or keyboard to tell someone about their post because they lack the patience to wait a day for it to show up.  This may detract from “making it real”, but that is the difference (besides not be public for ALL to see) between this and real world cyber-talk.  In real world cyber-talk, words get thrown out in just cold black and white type that can easily be misconstrued or taken more negatively than intended—and there is no getting them back.
8. Monitor carefully.  Allowing free type is a quick way to get posts that everyone in the community can point at and ask “How are you allowing this to be said on a school web site?”  At our school, each teacher receives the comments and posts made by students in their homeroom via email, after which they can decide whether to have these comments show up as is, in altered form, or not at all.  This job should not be outsourced to a parent, nor should one person oversee all content. 
9. Allow as much as possible to go through unaltered Insure posts and comments will appear with as little wait as possible.  In general, you should not have more than a 24 hour lag between the submitting and the approval. (see #2).
10. Get teacher and student to buy in before you go live.

“Become a student of change. It is the only thing that will remain constant.”
- Anthony J. D'Angelo

1. Annoying Someone Online Becomes Federal Crime, Wikinews January 2006
2. Patchin, J. W. & Hinduja, S. Cyberbullying: A Preliminary Profile of Offending and Victimization. Manuscript in review.
3. Patchin, J. W. & Hinduja, S. Offline Consequences of Online Victimization: School Violence and Delinquency. Journal
of School Violence
4. National Children's Home. (2005). Putting U in the picture. Mobile Bullying Survey 2005
5. Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K.J., & Wolak, J. (2000). Online victimization: A report on the nation’s youth. Alexandria, VA: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
6. Jane Nelson.  Positive Discipline- Revised 25th Anniversary Edition

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