Cyberbullying and Digital Citizenship
Image retreived from TheLionsDen.com
Cyberbullying is different than in person bullying as many times the bully online can be 'anonymous'. This means that they can express themselves in a negative manner without facing direct consequences and many times they do this by creating a new personna that they then use to torment the victims. Many times the person that a bully is online is a different one from who they are in person- they develop an online personna. A good way to fight cyberbullying to to create a culture of citizenship and have children be the same person as they are in person as they are online. ( To find out more information about the created online personna click here)
This week, our task was to find resources that we, as future teachers, could implement both inside and outside the classroom to help prevent cyber-bullying. Of couse, outside of the classroom, a teacher isn't able to control the behaviour of her/his students but within the classroom a teacher can educate her/his students on the effects of cyberbullying. There are many resources that can help with this.
Pinterest is one of the great resources used for collecting and sharing such educational resources ( and many more). To access my resources on cyberbullying incuding: videos, posters, and additional tools that teachers to talk about cyberbullying in the classroom, click here
Part B: Digital Citizenship Lesson Plan
To follow along with the video read below:
The Internet can be comprehended as a living, breathing community and it is comprised of all of its users and everyone who engages within it. Thus, everyone needs to abide by a common code of conduct that is in place to help in the governance of the internet. This code can be defined as the Digital Citizenship. By thinking of the Internet as a society or community, students can invest themselves in it and become the citizens of the Internet. To teach students about digital citizenship, we need to first educate them on the culture of the Internet. The Internet can be used positively by adolescents as an opportunity to express their freedom and creativity. And so, by allowing each student to play their part in this wider, interactive community- the student would begin to establish a sense of belonging to it and want to have a positive influence as opposed to a negative.
Here is a Lesson Plan I have constructed that includes an activity that can be done with your senior high English class as a way to get students thinking about Digital Citizenship.