What to Do When Students Abuse Social Technology

A reader writes:

I have been using blogging for the last year and a half and had a huge recent set back. Two posts were added to a student assignment, using cursing, insulting my students, the school, and I.

All student identities are anonymous so no one can track them, but parents are unwilling to give students emails, and therefore cannot get IDs. I also monitor all comments, and therefore caught it pretty quickly. This has never happened in my year and a half of blogging assignments

Any advice for this? It's so disheartening to take so many small steps forward and then one giant leap back.

Go public.

And I'm talking big time.

Don't sit on this. Don't treat it as an isolated disciplinary event. And don't get despondent.

Go public.

Hold a meeting for the school community; maybe try to work this out with your PTA. Make sure there are tons of parents there.

And show them the offending comments.

And explain to them that these sorts of comments are not a product of technology.

Rather, these comments are an example of why we need to teach kids how to use social tech. I've said it before: Don't like using YouTube because of all the vulgarity and hate in the comments? Then teach kids how to use social tech responsibly and help raise a generation that will not tolerate abusive language on YouTube.

The parents need to understand that social technology is not going away. And they need to understand that it is in their own best interest that their kids understand both how to use it and how to be responsible digital citizens.

This sort of thing, more than anything else, should help bolster your argument for why we need to be integrating social tech into our classrooms on a daily basis. Because it's about changing culture. Take charge of this teachable moment.