Cyberbullying

Being in the library, have seen cyber bullying happen in our school many times. In fact our library system allows students to "friend" each other so you can see what your friends are reading. As the administrator I monitor and have to approve all activity including friending and messaging between the students. At first they were using it as Facebook and I have to stop many, many messages and had to call several student down to have the cyber bullying talk with them. Once the students figured out I was monitoring it the inappropriate comments stopped. I know they still exist in other virtual world though. I was really happy to see our district create a module about cyber bullying we had to take our students through as part of them learning to live in a digital world. They got to see real life experiences of students who were both hurt and others who were punished because of cyber bullying. The class discussion (at least with my students) seemed to really open their eyes to the dangers of this as well as the consequences. I think we need to continue to promote digital communication and teach the students the appropriate ways to do that.