Tag Archives: Web safety

Resources to Teach Your Students about Cyberbullying and Online Responsibility

Article posted by Justin W. Patchin in July 26, 2011 at 4:27 pm.
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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.

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How young is too young for Facebook?

Article posted by Justin W. Patchin in June 7, 2011 at 12:16 pm.
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This is a common question I receive from many parents: “At what age should I give my child a cell phone or allow them to be on Facebook?” Of course this is not an easy question to answer since every child is different and parents themselves are probably in the best position to determine the most appropriate age. That said, I usually advise parents to think about allowing access to certain devices or web environments a little bit earlier than they might think is the right time. The issue really is that parents need to be the ones who introduce the technology to the child, not the youth’s peers. If parents wait too long or try to convince themselves that their child has no interest in Facebook, then odds are good that the child will learn about the site from a friend and set up a profile without the parent’s knowledge.

 

I recently spoke to a teacher who is a parent of a 5th grader who asked my opinion about whether her son should be on Facebook. I told her that it probably wasn’t a good idea. It is a violation of Facebook’s terms of use, and agree with them or not, parents shouldn’t encourage their children to break the rules. Thankfully there are many other emerging sites that are designed exclusively for tweens, such as togetherville, which interfaces with Facebook. Admittedly, it is difficult to get younger social networkers excited about these alternatives since “all of their friends are already on Facebook.”

 

And some data suggests that they are right: Consumer Reports recently reported that as many as 13% of Facebook’s American users are under the age of 13 (about 7.5 million kids). And half or more of the students I speak to Facebook hasn’t completely ignored their rules, however, as they reportedly remove tens of thousands of under-aged youth every day. Of course if a user lies about his or her age when setting up the profile, it is very difficult for Facebook to know whether someone is underage so they rely on reports of violators.

 

This leads to another question I get: “If I see a person on Facebook who I know to be under 13, should I report the user?” This too is a complicated question. My response used to automatically be “yes.” If they are violating the rules, they should not be on the site. I have tempered my response a bit in recent months, informed by insights from colleagues, educators, and Internet safety experts. In general, whether or not to report an under-aged user depends on whether you have a concern about them being on the site—based on what you know about the user and/or what you see on his or her profile. If you are worried that their activities on Facebook could lead to significant social, educational, physical, or other problems, then you have an obligation to report (to the site or the youth’s parents, or both). If you see a 12-year-old whom you know well who is on the site and they have their privacy settings adjusted so that all of their information is protected to the maximum extent possible, perhaps it isn’t necessary to report the user. You still might want to take the person aside and talk about some of the concerns you have (posting too much personal or identifiable information, meeting someone in real life who they only know online, including gossiping or harassing content, etc.) to encourage him or her to continue making good decisions about their online activities. As Larry Magid, tech journalist and internet safety advocate points out, changing the rules to allow younger users on Facebook would create opportunities for the site to incorporate protections that just aren’t in place when kids lie about their age. This is certainly a perspective that should be considered.

 

Overall, parents should provide gradual and guided access to technology. Maybe, for example, you give your son a cell phone at age 10, but to start the only persons he can call are mom and dad. After a couple of months if he demonstrates appropriate behaviors you can add selected others. Then add texting. Show him the cell phone bill every month so he knows his contribution to the family expenses. Stress that the phone is a privilege that can be taken away with misuse. If he makes a mistake, take a step back. If he is texting at the dinner table, explain to him why this is unacceptable. If he is talking to friends all hours of the night, confiscate the phone for a while. I suspect that if more parents were actively involved in encouraging the responsible use of technology, even at a relatively young age, there would be fewer and less serious problems later in their adolescent lives.

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Password Safety Among Teens

Article posted by Sameer in April 27, 2011 at 9:42 am.
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Passwords are necessary to access personal accounts on a computer network. They serve as “authentication” devices and uniquely identify someone as being who they claim to be. Of course, correct authentication prevents others from accessing or altering your personal data. In our current Information Age, passwords are a part of everyday life. However, some users inadvertently make themselves vulnerable to cyberbullying by exposing or carelessly distributing their password. Many youth simply don’t see the risk in telling others their password. In our school assemblies to students, we ask how many of them know their best friend’s computer password, and (perhaps not surprisingly) a majority of the hands are raised. To be honest, this is very alarming to us. Even if youth are responsible enough not to distribute their passwords deliberately, they might inadvertently expose them to others. Many users leave their passwords on a sticky note next to their computers (in case they forget it!). Someone who visits may see it and remember it for later use.

 

Why is it important to keep passwords secret? An example will help to illustrate the potential problems. A teenage boy might select a Facebook password that is very difficult to guess, but because it is so difficult, might write it down on a small slip of paper taped underneath his keyboard. When his best friend comes over for a visit, the keyboard might accidentally be dropped—revealing the taped paper and, consequently, the password. If that friendship goes sour, the password could be used by the (ex-) best friend to access the account and then upload humiliating content for everyone to read or see.

 

Even if adolescents are extremely careful in never writing down their passwords or disclosing them to others, a password might still be discovered through other means. For example, some Internet content providers have “password hint questions,” which allow users to retrieve forgotten passwords to online accounts by responding correctly to the questions presented. If the response is successful, an e-mail is sent to the address associated with the account. Within this e-mail, the current password or a new password is given. One of these password hint questions might be “What is my pet’s name?” If someone knows your pet’s name and you’ve used it as a password hint, an e-mail with password information would be sent to the relevant e-mail account. If a person knows how to access that e-mail account, access to other Internet accounts may be possible. Through this procedure, a person can change the passwords of all of your other online accounts simply by having access to your e-mail and knowing a few facts about you.

 

Finally, some people use the same password for multiple purposes—school and personal e-mail, Facebook, instant message and chat programs, eBay, PayPal, and many other accounts online. As such, finding out the password to one account can lead to simple access to other accounts. While we are considering cyberbullying in this text, there are obvious risks associated with identity theft when someone commandeers another person’s password. Below is a list of some of our recommendations that everyone —children and adults alike— should follow when creating passwords for Web- and software-based accounts.

 

Recommendations for Creating a Unique Password
• Use passwords with at least seven characters
• Make a mixture of UPPER and lower case letters, numbers, and non-alphabetic characters
• Use first letters of an uncommon sentence, song, poem, quote, etc.
• Use word fragments not found in the dictionary (mihtaupyn)
• Use short words separated by characters (dog%door; candy$trip)
• Transliteration: like “vanity license plates” (e.g., “Elite One” becomes “E1te0nE”)
• Lines from a childhood verse or popular song (“Baby you’re a firework, Come on let your colors burst” becomes ByafColycb)
• Phrases from movies (“May the Force be with you” becomes MtFbwu)
• Expressions inspired by the name of a city (“Big lights will inspire you, let’s hear it for New York” becomes BLwiylhifNY)
• Interweave characters in two words: (“Play Date” becomes PateDlay)

 

Are there any other safe password practices that you follow and recommend to others that have worked particularly well? Please let us know.

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New Report: “Youth Safety on a Living Internet”

Article posted by Justin W. Patchin in June 5, 2010 at 4:24 pm.
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The Online Safety and Technical Working Group just released their comprehensive report “Youth Safety on a Living Internet” detailing the current state of knowledge, practice, and tools regarding safeguarding our youth while they explore technology.  The Report focused primarily on identifying industry efforts to promote online safety through education, technology, content, and other measures.  In short, the Report recognized some promising approaches but acknowledged there is much more work to be done.

As the title suggests, the Internet is constantly changing.  This creates particular challenges for adults who are simply trying to keep up.  No matter how the Internet (and technology more broadly) changes, we as adults must also adapt so that we can teach our children the practical rules of the digital road.  And this Report gives us some guidance with respect to how we should proceed.  For example, the authors note: “In focusing so much on blocking new media from school as a protection, schools are failing to do with today’s media what they have long done for students with traditional media – enrich and guide their use” (page 3).  This is an issue many educators are struggling with.  They see the value in technology and can see great potential for its use as a pedagogical tool in and outside of the classroom but are disinclined to risk their job or reputation for the possible negative repercussions.  It’s simply easier to ban technology from the classroom and prohibit teachers from interacting with students online than to develop comprehensive policies and practices to manage its utilization.  Frankly I don’t blame them for being gun-shy about this.  Unfortunately this approach is stunting our ability to move education forward.   One of the many important recommendations from the Subcommittee on Internet Safety Education on page 7 was to “Encourage full, safe use of digital media in schools’ regular instruction and professional development in their use as a high priority for educators nationwide.”

Another important insight identified in the report is that it will take a multi-disciplinary and varied effort to accomplish our goal of educating teens about online safety and responsibility.  Indeed, the Working Group was comprised of folks from across the spectrum (industry, academia, government, the media, and elsewhere).  Moreover, the group was quick to acknowledge that there is no magic pill or piece of software or school curriculum that by itself will appease our concerns or fully protect our kids while online. “There’s no one-size-fits-all, once-and-for-all solution to providing children with every aspect of online child safety. Rather, it takes a comprehensive ‘toolbox’ from which parents, educators, and other safety providers can choose tools appropriate to children’s developmental stages and life circumstances, as they grow” (page 5).  Our children, like the technology they use, are constantly changing and as parents and those who regularly work with youth, we have a responsibility to evolve with both.

Over the next couple of weeks, Sameer and I will continue to break down the Report and discuss specific issues that are relevant to our efforts at the Cyberbullying Research Center.  We certainly encourage everyone to read the complete report because if you follow this blog, you are not only likely interested in its analysis, recommendations, and conclusions, but are no doubt an important part of the solution moving forward.  As the authors point out, a summary report like this is only a first step.  What is done with the report will be the real test of its significance.  Take a moment to recognize the role you play, as a teacher, administrator, law enforcement officer, researcher, parent, teen, or any of the other numerous pieces of this important puzzle.  What can you do today that will help youth be safer online tomorrow?

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What is your Online Reputation?

Article posted by Justin W. Patchin in May 28, 2010 at 4:24 pm.
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I have been talking a lot lately about online reputation with teens.  I think it is important for youth to recognize that anything they put online and anything they do offline that gets posted online, could end up being immortalized on the World Wide Web.  I advise students to start thinking about their online reputation at an early age – the earlier the better.  I begin this discussion by asking them if they have ever ‘Googled’ themselves and ask them to think about what came.  Is it anything good?  How about something embarrassing or even inappropriate?  I tell them that without a doubt others are exploring the Internet for information.  Friends, adults in their lives, and future employers, among others, will search for them online and judge them and base decisions about jobs or other opportunities based on what they find out.  In fact, a recent study sponsored by Microsoft found that 79% of recruiters and human resources managers review information about potential employees that is available online, and 70% said they disqualified applicants due to what they found.

I suggest that teens (and adults for that matter) work extra hard to do great things at school and in the community (e.g., making the honor roll, volunteering, extra-curricular activities, etc) so that when one does search for them, they find evidence of hard work, integrity, and civic-mindedness.  This is especially important if a teen does make a mistake and posts something inappropriate online – they want to bury the bad with good things.  This can also be useful if someone is cyberbullying or harassing students by posting rumors or hurtful comments about them in a way that might show up in a search.  In fact it is difficult if not impossible to completely prevent someone from smearing you electronically – the best approach is to create an online reputation that emphasizes the positives and minimizes any of the negatives.   What have you done lately that might be found online that others might judge you on?

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