URL: http://cyberbullying.org/blog
Cyberbullying is an increasing problem facing many youths on social media. This Blog is the official blog for the Cyberbullying Research Center. It is a great resource for parents, teachers, administrators and older children. The site includes advice and safety tips for parents around Snapchat, anonymous apps, password management and many more. It provides resources for teachers and administrators through articles such as: “What the Best Bullying and Cyberbullying Assembly Speakers Do”, “Bullying Assembly Programs – What Schools Need to Know”, “Preventing Bullying Through Kindness”, “Combating Bullying During Kindness Week”, etc.
For anyone remotely naive to social media, this site brings you into reality. The blog contains an article on “sextortion” and “revenge porn”. Through the article, I learned a lot about these two topics and their effects on our youth. The post defines sextortion: “…sextortion involves threats to expose a sexual image in order to make a person do something or for other reasons, such as revenge or humiliation.” The blog also has posts about helpful books regarding social media and youth. For example, there is a blog post about Dr. Borba’s book, “UnSelfie: Why Empathic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World. According to the post, “Dr. Borba argues that empathy-building is the key to raising kids who can rise above the problem behavior producing situations they might find themselves in.”
This site is extremely helpful and provides a large variety of informative through inspirational and directive articles. I learned more details about Yik Yak, revenge porn, Snapchat, Instagram and cyberbullying. Yik Yak is becoming an extremely popular site for cyberbullying. Students can make comments anonymously, so that they can say what they want without having to take responsibility for their comments. I also learned that the goal shouldn’t be to stop or prevent social media, but instead to teach important qualities to children such as empathy, truth and kindness. This website built my knowledge around social media sites and issues that students will face. It showed me that social media doesn’t have to be bad. It can be used to prevent bullying, create opportunities for kindness and promote conversation and connection. However, in order for the pros of social media to outweigh the cons, it takes a great deal of awareness on the part of youth, teachers, administrators and parents. This site provides a great avenue and resources for that awareness.
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