“Tell a teacher, tell the principal... tell someone!”

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by Pinelopi Zaka (pinelopi.zaka@gmail.com, @paz11uc)

It is not only the kids that have a lot to learn from adults, but obviously adults have a lot to gain in designing their practices by listening to kids’ views; especially when it comes to issues that kids experience every day, such as bullying and their expectations from us as adults in supporting them.

During the Ulearn11 conference I had the opportunity to meet NetSafe Research Manager Dr John Fenaughty, who talked to me passionately about his research on New Zealand High-school students' activity on cyberspace, the challenges and distress they experience and their actions towards resiliency.

36 groups of students were interviewed and 1,673 were surveyed on their experiences in cyberspace. The findings of this study highlight the need to provide students with adequate support to overcome the challenges they are often facing; key results include:

• Almost 95% of the students access the cyberspace at least 3 times per week, mainly for communication and research.
• 67.5% reported that they experienced a challenge on the cyberspace and for half of these students the challenge was distressing.
• The challenges that students reported include: Harassment, cyberbullying, cyberbullying and harassment, meeting with new people and strangers, unwanted sexual solicitation, sexual content, other inappropriate content, copyright infringement, computer security issues, inappropriate digital footprint, time-management.
• Cyberbullying was the most distressing challenge for the students.
• The most common practice to manage distress was ignoring the challenge; however, this practice never led to resolution.
• Almost 40% of students turned to social support to manage distress.
• Social support, including support from adults was not associated with the resolution of most of the challenges students experienced on the cyberspace.

Whether we are educators or family we all have the responsibility to support kids, no matter in which environment (school, home...) they experience these challenges. We are all part of kids’ environment. They believe in us (or they want to believe in us) as adults, and expect us to be able to help them and make things right. Are we? They often come and talk to us and then what? What do we do to encourage these kids to trust us?

Developing empathy is perhaps where preparation to provide adequate support needs to begin from... listening to kids’ experiences while putting ourselves in their shoes.

Related topics on Educating the Dragon:

Bullying

Cyber-safety

Behaviour

Resources:

• Photo by Ias - initially
• Cyberbullying: Information and advice for young people, parents and teachers by NetSafe
• Cyberbullying articles by NetSafe
• Cyberbullying: by Raising Children Network, Australia
• John Fenaughty (2010). Challenging Risk: NZ High-school Students’ Activity, Challenge, Distress, and Resiliency, within Cyberspace.
• Peter K. Smith, Jess Mahdavi, Manuel Carvalho, Sonja Fisher, Shanette Russell, Neil Tippett (2008). Cyberbullying: its nature and impact in secondary school pupils.
• Quing Li (2006). Cyberbullying in Schools: A Research of Gender Differences.

What INESS have recently been doing

Brett Lee says:

"This part of the year saw us travelling and speaking to audiences all across Australia and New Zealand. It was a privilege to pass our message onto thousands of primary, secondary and adult audiences. Mining towns throughout western Queensland, Brisbane Catholic Education PD, Melbourne Teen Expo, school communities in and around Queenstown New Zealand, Lutheran Pastors Conference, Queensland Secondary Schools Principals Conference and a Skype keynote to New Zealand where some of the interesting engagements I was given the opportunity to be involved with.

Everyday of the week, with every presentation, I learn more through the students and teachers. Being armed with this knowledge is a vital part of the process that we are involved in when it comes to bringing a relevant and up to date message to our audiences. Although we alone cannot change a person's internet based behaviours it is great to be an effective part of the overall process in teaching positive digital messages and giving users reasons for making sound online choices.

Having delivered thousands of presentations over the past years I have seen a definite change in the overall perception of communicating via the internet when it comes to our youth. I fully believe that teachers and parents are crucial in educating our youth in positive internet based skills and that YOU are making a difference.

Whilst presenting to a primary Brisbane Catholic School last term a year 4 student said to her teacher "someone asked me for my address on the computer the other day" to which the teacher replied "did you tell them". The student replied "no of course not, I'd never do that, mum said I shouldn't give my address to strangers on the internet". This is not knowledge the student is born with, it was taught to her. Most students of her age 3 years ago would have given out that information because they would have had no reason not to. We ARE making a difference."

Useful links:

Brett Lee's blog
Booking a cyber-safety workshop
Iness Brochure
CyberSafety for Schools
Cyber-Safety: What can you and your school do?
Other blog posts... 

Things to do:

Follow the news and subscribe to Iness newsletter
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Cyber-Safety: What can you and your school do?

Brett Lee is fast becoming a leading expert on Cyber-safety and what young people need to be aware of while navigating social media sites.
His unique experience in the cyber-crime unit enables him to share with teachers and parents some of the dangers facing students today and some of the simple precautions they can take.

Back in February he was the keynote speaker at Learning@Schools conference in Rotorua. View his keynote address below.



Things to do:
Use Brett's keynote to provoke staff meeting discussion this term. 
Book Brett to visit your staff and parents
Subscribe to Edtalks
Subscribe to Brett’s newsletter
Join the Software for Learning discussion about Facebook
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Do we need cybersafety agreements?

Tara Taylor-Jorgensen share her thoughts on cyber-safety and poses something interesting questions.

• Why do we force agreements on students and their parents when we don’t do that for any other curriculum area?
• Does it assume that students will do something BAD on the internet even before they are introduced to the media?
• Is it relevant for the students when they sign these agreements on school entry at five years old?
• Are we compromising student empowerment for the sake of wellbeing?
• Is cyber-safety the new ‘stranger danger’? Even if it is, violence against children, more often than not happened within families and communities.
• Is it about the victims? Or should it be about those that are hurting people?
• Is there not more bullying in schools and the community than in the ‘cyber-world’?
• Is web- filtering doing our students a disservice?
• Is it not better to have real conversations with the kids while working with them online?
• Does there need to be a national framework that school implement or will those decisions be left to the individual institutions?

Good questions...

How would you answer?


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Emerging Leaders' Symposium 2011

Nga mihi,
Some of you have seen the article in this month's Interface magazine about the 2011 Emerging Leaders' Symposium, but here is more information. It's an 'unconference' for emerging leaders in education; please consider either registering yourself or passing it on to the young guns in your school. It promises to be quite an exciting and inspiring event.

Did you know?

• 10,000 of New Zealand's 50,000 teachers are nearing retirement age.
• 50% of newly-qualified teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years.
  

We need to foster emerging leaders in education. We need to give them a voice and support them to develop a vision for the future of education, because soon that future will be in their hands. To this end, a group of emerging leaders have convened a two-day symposium in Auckland on 28th and 29th April 2011. Emerging leaders are invited to attend this 'unconference' to prepare a vision for the future of education in New Zealand-Aotearoa. This vision will be presented to Karen Sewell on the second day of the symposium.


Useful Links:
Emerging Leaders' on Facebook page


Thanks Mark for the info.
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Safety Online: Are we making a difference?

Brett Lee, Closing Keynote for Learning at Schools conference says “Yes, we are.”

No longer will you see children jumping around on the backseat of the car but sitting, buckled up. The reason being is that if ‘dad’ were to have an accident then you could be seriously injured or killed. The other reason being that it is the law that everyone wear their seatbelt and ‘dad’ could get into a lot of trouble if you’re caught by police without a seatbelt on.

Two very good reasons; and so it is with Internet safety. Brett believes that students simply need the reasons spelt out.

From Brett’s  keynote he identified that:

• we can never under estimate the power of the screen in young people’s lives
• the technology will change over time but our protective practises, responsibilities and beliefs should remain
• we as teachers and parents only line of defence for our kids against the World-Wild Web.
• we can instil quality online behaviours in our children
• we must always believe we are making a difference to how our students interact socially within the internet. 

 Brett also identified the need for students to aware of the issue of cyber-bullying he share the video below and talked about the reality of the screen for young people.Interacting in an online space and/or through text messaging allows our students to create in minds a construct of reality that is not accurate but merely a projection of what others desire us to perceive.

Upper Coomera State College

Caught In The Crowd | Myspace Video

Useful Links:

Brett’s keynote on Learning at School blog 

Netsafe’s myLGP 

Cyber-safety discussion 
Cyber-safety page on Educating the Dragon 

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Cyber Safety in school

Everyone needs to take responsibility for cybersafety of children. Parents, teachers, everyone. 

There is a responsibility a Board of Trustees has to “maintain a safe physical and emotional environment, a responsibility to consult with the community.” This includes the cybersafety of staff, students and parents on the school grounds.


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