According to a newspaper report out of Canberra, schools could leave themselves open to being sued if their students are cyber-bullied inside school grounds.

 

Amy Dwyer and Patricia Easteal, from the University of Canberra published their paper, Cyber Bullying in Australian Schools: The question of negligence and liability, and applied existing laws to cyber bullying to discover if a school could be liable for the abuse.

 

What they concluded might surprise some. They found that a school could be held accountable if:

* the cyber bullying occurred on school grounds,

* occurred during school hours

* or by using school owned technology.

 

Many schools attempt to distance themselves from cyberbullying, particularly if it happens “out of hours” but Dwyer and Easteal assert that schools could also be liable if the bullying occurred out of hours but in connection with a school-related activity. I wonder what would constitute a “connection.” For example, would a late-night Facebook post criticizing the appearance of another at the school’s swimming carnival leave a school open to a claim?

 

They also warned that schools would be at risk if they had no policy to protect students. Whilst I’d be stunned to find a school in Australia without such a policy, I do wonder how effective schools’ approaches in this space are.

 

Last year I wrote a piece that examined how we “teach” social media in school. I drew the analogy of driving lessons. If we taught young people to drive, in the same way a lot of schools teach social media, it would involve:

 

* Young people being taught to drive by adults who had very little experience on the road.

 

* Driving lessons would only focus on what not to do when driving.

 

* And lessons would never take place in a real car.

Read the full article to see what I mean by these!

 

I’m sure you’re all aware of the many experts who run around the country on the back of these kind of news stories… it really is great for business.

 

Unfortunately, they only serve to perpetuate the Driving Lesson Paradigm highlighted above.

 

Two people who I’ve come across in my work, and for whom I have a lot of respect, seek to empower schools, teachers, parents and – most importantly – kids to become responsible digital citizens. And they won’t charge you half your entire ICT budget for the privilege.

I’d recommend you have a look at Pip Cleaves from Design, Learn Empower. Pip can help you address all of the issues addressed above as well as classroom approaches.

 

For another really innovative approach to digital citizenship is, you should really see how Nick Jackson from Digital Leaders Australia could work with your school. It has had great success in the UK, and is growing here in Australia.

 

If you do nothing else today to address student wellbeing in the ICT space, take a look at these two links. And I stress I have no affiliation to either of these, other than I like what they are about.

Author: Dan Haesler, he is a teacher, consultant, and speaker at the Mental Health & Wellbeing of Young People seminars. He is the co-developer of Happy Schools and blogs at http://danhaesler.com/ and tweets at @danhaesler