I was talking with an educator last week about enlisting students to help create a healthy, thriving, and fun school climate, and specifically brought up the idea of flash mobs and lip-dubs. Many of our students have talents and abilities which we should really tap in order to help us promote positive attitudes and behaviors across our campus. Unfortunately, we don’t do this often enough, even though student voice is such a powerful thing and can make way more of an impact than the efforts of well-meaning adults. A flash mob is a large group of people who suddenly break into synchronized song or choreographed dance — sometimes both – in a public place for the purposes of entertainment, artistic expression, or to bring attention to a cause. A lip-dub is a music video where a group of individuals are recorded lip-syncing a song, after which the original audio of the song is dubbed over the video in post-editing. Many students (including myself!) have grown up in dance – whether it’s...

Bullying that specifically targets youth and young adults based on their sexual orientation or gender identity/expression has been a problem for decades. The increased utilization of technology among youth (and, well, just about everyone) has resulted in bullying behaviors moving online. As a result, cyberbullying perpetrated against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth has emerged. It is clear that more can be done to prevent these incidents of hate perpetrated online. This summary explores what the research says about the connection between bullying/cyberbullying and sexual orientation/identity, and discusses relevant strategies that youth-serving adults can implement. Hinduja, S. & Patchin, J. W. (2020). Bullying, Cyberbullying, and LGBTQ Students. Cyberbullying Research Center. Retrieved [insert date], from https://cyberbullying.org/bullying-cyberbullying-sexual-orientation-lgbtq.pdf Download the Guide The post Bullying, Cyberbullying, and LGBTQ...

This Fact Sheet provides you with the instructions on how to create an image or video of what you see on any screen (on any device – your laptop, tablet, gaming console, Kindle, phone, iWatch, etc.) so that evidence of cyberbullying (or any other problematic behavior) can be saved and used for an investigation at school, or to send to a social media or gaming company to get an account taken down, or to give to the police. Securing digital evidence is so critical! Hinduja, S. & Patchin, J. (2021). Cyberbullying fact sheet: Taking screenshots and screen recordings to preserve evidence. Cyberbullying Research Center. Retrieved [insert date], from https://cyberbullying.org/making-cyberbullying-screenshots.pdf Download PDF The post Cyberbullying Fact Sheet: Taking Screenshots and Screen Recordings to Preserve Evidence appeared first on Cyberbullying Research Center.

One of the questions we have been asked most often over the last 18 months is whether bullying has gotten better or worse since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Early on, there was a concern that cyberbullying incidents in particular would increase as youth were spending more time online. Additionally, many young children were perhaps given premature access to technology with inadequate support or supervision as schools hurriedly moved to virtual educational activities and parents simply needed to survive the extended time children had at home. On the other hand, we have long known that bullying online is often connected to bullying at school and therefore fewer students at schools might translate to fewer problems online. Despite these speculations, however, I’ve mostly had to respond to the question about bullying during the pandemic by saying that we simply don’t know. Recently, though, initial research has emerged to provide some insight about the nature and extent of bullying...

I was sitting in the bleachers of my son’s recent hockey practice when another parent came up to me and sheepishly asked: “Does your son have a phone?” “Funny you should ask,” I replied. Coincidentally enough, we gave our son his first full-functioning phone that very day. I don’t think this particular parent knows what I do for a living, so he wasn’t asking “the expert,” he was simply asking another parent. This led to a nice conversation about what I have learned about kids and devices in my research over the years.   As I’ve traveled the world the last two decades speaking with parents about family technology issues, it is without a doubt the most frequently asked question I get: When should I give my child a phone? There is, of course, no easy answer to this question. It depends on a lot of factors, including the child, the parent(s), and the circumstances. Is the child mature enough to handle the responsibility? Are the parents prepared to provide guidance and instruction? Is...

Over the last few months, politicians in many states across America* have introduced and/or passed bills that allow individuals to file civil lawsuits against social media platforms that remove or restrict their online posts. In my home state of Florida, our governor recently signed such a bill into law (SB7072) to protect against “Silicon Valley elites,” “censorship,” and “other tyrannical behavior.” This is a big deal. We can all agree that we do not want our First Amendment rights to free expression to be limited unfairly when it comes to what we want to post and share on the Internet. We can all also agree that we do not want to be subjected to online hate, abuse, or other forms of harm because users of a platform are given no parameters or rules about appropriate social behavior, nor face any consequences for transgressions. But is there a happy medium to be found? Is the status quo good enough? Before I answer that, let us back up and contextualize the current controversy by...

The U.S. Supreme Court has just released a highly anticipated opinion in the case of a Pennsylvania high school cheerleader who was suspended from the team for profanity about the team that was posted to Snapchat on the weekend. (If you are new to Mahanoy v. B.L., see my previous posts here and here.) We were primarily interested in this case because of the potential implications of the sweeping and unique opinion offered by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which intimated that schools have no authority whatsoever when it comes to disciplining student behavior or speech that occurs off-campus. The Supreme Court rightfully rejected this stance: “Unlike the Third Circuit, we do not believe the special characteristics that give schools additional license to regu­late student speech always disappear when a school regu­lates speech that takes place off campus.” The Court ultimately did side with the student, but stopped short of providing a playbook for when schools can (or must)...