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Now is the time to start thinking about what *you* are going to do to educate your students about cyberbullying, digital citizenship, online responsibility, and overall safety. A key to any educational effort is consistent reinforcement of the messages you want students to incorporate into their daily lives. Convening an all-school assembly on these topics once each schoolyear is not sufficient. But bringing up online issues even for just a few minutes regularly (daily!) can be very effective. No matter what your area of teaching expertise is, you can talk about digital citizenship. When it comes to educating your students about online issues, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are tons of great resources freely available on the web. You already know about our site, but in case you haven’t explored it fully, below are just a couple of examples of activities you can incorporate into your classes.

Cyberbullying Word Find. You can start a discussion about cyberbullying with a fun activity that introduces important terms and concepts to your students. After all of the words are found you can talk about what they mean and how to avoid problems. Or you could separate the word list from the sheet and announce them one at a time and briefly discuss them as they are found! One school we talked to laminated our Word Find (and our Crossword Puzzle and Word Scramble) and used them over and over in different upper elementary classes and the class that solved them the quickest one a pizza party!

Quizzes. We have three short online quizzes that you can use to assess your student’s knowledge about cyberbullying: The Facts about Cyberbullying; Dealing with Cyberbullying; and Addressing Cyberbullying. You can work through these in a computer lab or if personal devices are allowed in your school, you can direct your students to the site to complete the quizzes on their phone, tablet, or laptop. If those aren’t options, you can always print off the quiz and distribute it the old fashioned way! You can have students work in teams and give extra credit for those who get them all correct. After they are done with our quizzes, have each student (or team of students) search reputable sites online to come up with their own questions and answers!

Ideas to Get Teens Involved. In our presentations we talk a lot about how it takes a coordinated and comprehensive community effort to prevent and respond to cyberbullying. Parents, educators, law enforcement officers, faith leaders, and other community partners all have an essential role to play. But so do the teens themselves. There are a lot of great things youth can do to educate their community about cyberbullying – while learning a thing or two themselves. When working with small groups of teens I often ask teams of 4 or 5 students to come up with 2 creative ideas that they could do to educate their school and community about cyberbullying. One idea needs to be something that they *will do* within the next month and the other idea can be something that they would do if resources were unlimited. They always come up with some amazing ideas! One senior once told me that if money were no option he would get the whole school to go skydiving over the community with parachutes that said “Say No to Cyberbullying” on them. Great idea! What ideas do your students have? Get them involved and invested in creating and maintaining a bully-free culture in your school.

Pause Before You Post. Sameer and I partnered with Jostens to create “A Student’s Guide to Personal Publishing” that summarizes the issues that students need to keep in mind when posting information to the World Wide Web. You can use this guide to start a discussion with your students about some of the problems they see when looking at friends’ profiles. You can also take a few minutes to find some examples from the media where teens from your state or celebrities have gotten into some hot water because of what they have posted on the Internet. Taking the time to pause before you post anything online is always wise. If your school orders class rings or yearbooks from Jostens, ask your local representative about a complete “Pause Package” that includes a DVD, buttons, and other instructional materials.

These are just a few examples of how you can use our resources in your efforts to educate your students or children about cyberbullying and related issues. Please do explore the other resources we have for teens, educators, and parents. And let us know how you are using these and what is working! If you have any suggestions for new resources, drop us a note – we’d love to hear from you! We will share some additional suggestions in upcoming blog posts. There are a number of other great sites out there that have resources that we will highlight, so stay tuned! If you know of any, please let us know so we can spread the word. Also, if you are an educator thinking about teaching a whole class on cyberbullying or digital citizenship (at any level), stay tuned for a forthcoming blog post about what we and others we know have done that works.

A fun and often-recommended activity to engage youth in considering the responsible use of technology and promoting that message across the student body (or beyond) involves the creation of Public Service Announcements (PSAs). These are creative and informative videos designed to bring attention to a problem relevant to a certain audience, and make a memorable point about it. Often, they promote awareness of a particularly compelling social issue, and work to encourage individuals to act in positive, appropriate ways. They also tend to have a “coolness” factor not present in a handful of other awareness initiatives.

By way of illustration, a group of students can be assigned the task of creating an Anti-Cyberbullying PSA by using a digital video camera, digital camera, cell phone (which they all usually have on hand!), or even a web cam. Typically, they are instructed to brainstorm, plan, and then write out an instructive and memorable script or story while also figuring out backdrops and scenes. It can be short (around 30 seconds) or longer (a few minutes in length) – depending on the content covered and the intent of the video. Of course, it just shouldn’t drag on; it should be as concise and as hard-hitting as possible. These can then be uploaded to YouTube, TeacherTube, or a similar online video repository, with the web address shared widely to inform and educate others about the issue – via email, messages, or perhaps on the school’s official web site. They can also be shown to students in classrooms or through the morning or afternoon video announcements during the school day.

Teaching youth how to make wise decisions with their online participation and interaction seems to work better through repeated reminders that pique their conscience and bring the issue to the forefront of their mind. Perhaps after witnessing correct and healthy behavior by a peer acting out a role in a Public Service Announcement video, a student might be more inclined to mirror that behavioral choice when presented with a social opportunity in which he or she has a decision to make. Perhaps it will induce him or her to “do the right thing” after seeing someone else model that action.

Here are some examples of some student-created PSA videos we have seen:

To be sure, public service announcements don’t have to be “videos” – they can take the picture of colorful posters replete with word art, digital photos, bulletpoints, short narratives and stories, and anything else students may want to include. We encourage schools to administrate the creation of poster PSAs in any class, simply as a very relevant task for students while they discuss and share about cyberbullying, safe social networking, sexting, and other forms of teen technology misuse. This doesn’t need to occur in a computer-themed class – it can occur in a math class, a science class, an English class, a physical education class. In fact, it should occur wherever students are, because it is highly relevant to them.

Adults often complain that it is difficult to obtain and then retain the attention of youth. To that we say, talk to them about these technology-related issues, and give them assignments (such as these PSAs) to *engage* and align their minds and hearts with positive use! If you can connect with them on this level, their ears will perk up and they will lock in to what you have to say. Trust us, give it a try, and let us know how it worked for you!

Here are some examples of some student-created PSA posters we have seen:

If you know of any others – please share them with us and our readers!

As we work with youth-serving organizations across the nation, we often hear about how the resources we post on our web site are used. I was in New Hampshire last week, and heard that schools there makes laminated copies of our activities for kids (such as our crossword puzzle, word find, and word scramble), and then distributes them to students in classes at various elementary- and middle-school grade levels. Students then use dry-erase markers to fill them out, and then each class competes with other classes to earn the highest classroom-wide “successful completion” rate. The winning class then receives a pizza party! We thought this was a very creative (and environmentally-friendly) way to engage the minds of tech-involved tweens and teens, and get them excited about learning to do the right thing in cyberspace. If you’d like to share with us how you have recently used some of the materials and downloadables we provide, we’d love to hear from you!

We have long thought that one of the best ways to deal with cyberbullying (from prevention through intervention) is to involve teens.  Including youth is essential in any comprehensive and coordinated community response to cyberbullying.  Earlier in the week Sameer posted a blog discussing the ways that older teens can be used to mentor their younger counterparts in learning how to use technology safely and responsibly.  As a follow-up to that discussion, we just published a fact sheet that includes 10 ideas for practical activities that teens can easily do to work to prevent cyberbullying in their communities. This, however, is just a starting point.  What other ideas do you have that can allow teens to get actively involved in preventing or responding to cyberbullying?

We’ve had quite a bit of feedback regarding our recent post that discussed whether or not schools can discipline students for creating a Facebook page that is critical of, or harassing toward, a staff member.  The courts have given their perspective on a few different cases, but I thought I would post this simple poll for readers to weigh in themselves regarding their personal beliefs about what should or should not be allowed. Feel free to add the justification for your answer as a comment.

(if you don’t see a poll below, please try again later…we have been having trouble with the polling software)