California begins the New Year with a law aimed at curtailing cyberbullying. Assemblyman Ted Lieu introduced Assembly Bill 86, which “adds cyberbullying to school disciplinary codes that previously defined bullying only in terms of direct physical or verbal harassment.”
This bill is in response to the escalating issues with cyberbullying nationwide. At middle and high school sites – and even elementary sites – school administrators and counselors are seeking ways to reverse this cruel trend.
EGUSD has brought together an Internet Safety Task Force to address cyberbullying. One of the main Task Force goals is to develop a district wide program that embeds the ethical use of the Internet into the K-12 curriculum, with an initial focus on grades 4-6.
Throughout the year, the task force and 2Webwatchers will be providing the Elk Grove community with resource links to educate our students on what digital citizenship means. For our first elementary level resource, we recommend reading advice on cyberbullying posted to the McGruff.org website. The Shrink the Cyberbully game is appropriate for students in grades 3-6.
For additional resources on cyberbullying, please visit our 2Webwatcher resource links (right hand side bar). If you have online resources you would like to share, please leave us a comment.
Some great questions came out of Wednesday night’s Parent Internet Safety Workshop. Some of the safety issues that parents wanted more information on ranged from how to password protect their home computer (PC – running Windows XP | Apple – Mac – running OSX to turning on filtering capabilites within Google. As you can see from our links, GetNetWise is a great resource for video tutorials and other parent tools.
We also took a tour of MySpace and talked about the difference between setting a profile to private vs. public. For a guided tour of that process, click on the graphic below to launch the video. The video is also available online at GetNetWise.
Please feel free to post a comment if you have questions or if you would like to participate in a conversation about this topic. All comments are moderated and will show up after 2WebWatchers have reviewed them.
