It is called sharenting!!

That is a big word for those parents who innocently share too much information about and images of their children. Even the posting of a sonogram to your social media account can provide too much information to strangers who should not have that data.

The result is what many schools have been warning parents about- the danger of cyber bullying. Too much sharing can lead to a myriad of abuse from their fellow classmates as well as other children who gather on those websites designed for students to hang out.

According to the schools, this oversharing can put your child or children at risk of harm through mugging, theft and other bullying options.

What Are The Dangers Of Sharing Pictures Or Videos Of Your Children On Social Media?

The biggest danger will be exposing your children to predators. Even when you have strict privacy settings on your social media account, those privacy settings do not stop close friends from sharing your information on their not-so-strict social media accounts.

That sharing can lead to many dangers for your children. Plus, even strict privacy settings can be hacked by expert hackers who will use the information you post for nefarious schemes.

It is possible that oversharing can lead to identity fraud later on in your child’s life. Most likely, the exposure of your children to the public can lead to cyber bullying that brings devastating results.

What Is Cyber-Bullying?

Cyber bullying is more digital than physical. While it leads to physical results, cyber bullying takes place solely online using a phone, laptop, tablet or PC. It is where one or a group of individuals share false information about the targeted child.

This activity is done just about anywhere information can be shared online. Gaming rooms, texts, apps, social media outlets and more. Plus, the content is designed to harm another individual through negative, harmful, false, or mean content.

Even e-mails are not excluded from being a format used to cyber bully someone else. That negative content is not just written but can be done through altered or unflattering or embarrassing photos and videos.

Cyberbullying takes place in almost all online activities with just about any type of data possible.

How To Deal With Cyber-Bullying?

One of the most important steps you can take is to check your local laws. There may be some anti-cyberbullying laws that will guide the school in what action they can legally take.

Also, the school can develop its own policies directing teachers and the administration on how to respond to cyberbullying. These policies can lay out the discipline to be used or if expulsion is appropriate to stop students from being cyberbullies.

Also, schools can create a safe atmosphere that allows bullied students privacy to report cyberbullying. Encourage students to find someone they trust to share what is going on. Those trusted individuals can be parents, a teacher, school counsellor, and even a privacy contact page on your school web design.

One of the drawbacks to fighting cyberbullying is that only the targeted student and those the messages are meant for know it is taking place. Most often parents and school officials and teachers have no idea what is going on till a child becomes brave enough to talk about it.

How To Protect Your Child From Being Cyber-Bullied?

There are several steps you can take to help protect your child from being cyberbullied. Here are a few suggestions to get you on the right path:

– educate your children to identify cyberbullying and then teach them not to respond in kind. Instead, teach your children to be respectful to others whether in person or online

– teach your children not to respond to cyberbullies but keep the information saved as evidence it is taking place. Also, instruct your children to block cyberbullies

– set boundaries- this is where you create rules for internet and phone use as well as what internet sites they can go to and which ones are off limits.

– help your child create privacy and location settings and instruct them that participating in cyber bullying is wrong and unacceptable if they participate in it

– monitor your child’s online activities and know how to identify cyberbullying

– document everything- take screenshots, record dates, times and the nature of the cyber bullying and other documentation so you have evidence if needed.

When you need guidance in this delicate issue, contact our company. One of our priorities is protecting children from cyberbullying.

Cyberbulling via Facebook leads to teachers’ call for legal clampdown on uncontrolled social networks.
Scottish teachers have requested that the law be changed to make mainstream social networking sites more accountable for abusive and intimidating comments posted online by school children.
Scotland’s biggest teaching union claims it receives between 50 and 60 complaints a year from teachers who have been cyberbullied, harassed and threatened online by their students. It argues that new laws are needed to bring websites more into line with newspapers and broadcasters which are subject to defamation and libel legislation.

The union claims that social networking sites such as Facebook “have published derogatory material and in some cases it does a lot of emotional damage”.
“We need a change in the law to make liability rest with the site holders,” he said.
Schoolteachers have discovered abusive comments from their pupils on the web, often threatening physical violence. Some of the perpetrators have been charged with offences of breach of the peace and teachers have been left with anxiety attacks.
What do you think? Is it time for schools to re-educate social media users with alternative, controlled social networks for schools that redefine and reinforce the boundaries of acceptable and safe internet usage?

Interesting article debates whether childrens’ behaviour is being influenced as the line between fact and gossip becomes increasingly blurred thanks to unmoderated social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo.
Link to Telegraph article

The NASUWT Teachers Union has said that trying to understand the full impact of the Education funding cuts at this time is ‘like knitting fog’.
Certainly, after the backlash over the scrapping of 700 school building projects, the chancellor announcement that there will be £15.8bn to “rebuild and refurbish” 600 schools should mean that schools won’t need to find this funding from other budgets – what’s your take?

The headline messages we picked out are:

• The schools budget will see a real reduction in Department of Education resource spending of 3% by 2014-15.
• 60% reduction in real terms in capital spending over the Spending Review period. However over the Spending Review period there will be a total of £15.8 billion of capital spending. The average annual capital budget will be higher than the average annual capital budget in the 1997-98 to 2004-05 period.
• Funding grants streamlined i.e. Education Maintenance Allowances ended; procurement and back office savings; 33% admin reduction in real terms by closing NDPBs, reducing headcount, reducing the costs of the DfE estate and cutting nonessential expenditure.

Next steps will include further details contained in a Schools’ White Paper, a Special Educational Needs and Disability Green paper, and confirmation of local authority allocations for schools and early years provision.  We’ll keep an eye in developments and keep you updated on further announcements that are expected throughout the next three months.

As school managers will be aware, the Department of Education has been asked to prepare plans for cuts of between 10% and 20%. This would come to between £5.71bn and £11.42bn.
While it is now widely expected that front-line schools budgets (those received from local authorities via the Dedicated Schools grant,or DSG) will be protected from the worst of the cuts, the full impact on school spending will require very careful reading of the detail.

Of particular interest is the impact on ICT investments within schools. The cuts inevitably carry some threats to the modernisation of the teaching and learning profession – some projects have already been scrapped, including education facilitator BECTA.
On the other hand, there may be opportunities for schools to save costs and increase efficiencies – particularly in areas such as cloud computing, open source and even the prospect of local authority collaboration to achieve savings through sharing resources and/or technology expertise.
Whatever the outcome of Wednesday’s announcement, many schools will be looking very hard at the small print before making planning decisions for their next budget year.

The press is increasingly featuring stories that warn of the negative impacts of social media on school age children. Popular public social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are regularly blamed for sinister activities including cyber bullying, stalking and even gang violence.
Many believe, however, that the long-term educational benefits of social media far outweigh the risks. Most schools already use the Internet for teaching, and social media concepts are already essential elements in the lives of most students of Key Stage 2 and above.

Schools are already beginning to incorporate ways of using Facebook-like tools such as discussion forums, photo albums, blogs and secure messaging to develop subject learning through closer collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Safe Social Networking Tools are Available!
What’s required by schools is a means of controlling the perceived risks associated with social media. Banning is one solution. The other – dare we say more productive! – option is for schools to incorporate purpose-built internal social networking software as part of their ICT portfolio.
Webanywhere has developed Student Jotter as a way for students to share their work with peers within their social network, turning academic work into fun. Student Jotter avoids the dangers associated with social media use at school. Teachers can monitor and moderate everything that students post online, and third party influences by advertisers or other sources of inappropriate content are completely eliminated.
Social media used for teaching enables students to comment and critique each other’s work, collaborate in teams, and to securely send messages to each other and their teacher with queries or to start a discussion.
There are undoubted dangers in children using public social networks and schools cannot afford to take these risks lightly. However safe internal solutions are now available that schools can entrust to their students, providing them with familiar cutting edge technology and creating controlled social learning networks within the classroom and at home.
Visit the website of Student Jotter, our innovative system
for e-Portfolios and Secure Social Networking to see how it can benefit schools.

To celebrate the launch of our Learnanywhere Primary Learning Platform we’re giving away a FREE Apple iPad to one lucky school.

Primary Schools now have another exciting reason to buy Learnanywhere, the innovative easiest-to-use learning platform designed specifically for primary school communities of teachers, students and parents.
As proof that Webanywhere customers benefit from educational learning platforms that are built on more cutting-edge technology, every school that orders a new Learnanywhere Primary Learning Platform before the end of October can enter into a competition to win an Apple iPad 16GB, worth more than £400.

Just think about the potential uses that your school could have for an Apple iPad. Your ICT team could use it as your school’s remote content management device, ensuring that courses, events and digital assets are uploaded to your learning platform wirelessly in near real time. It could even be used as an incentive to teachers to reward individual teaching staff.
To be entered into the prize draw for the Apple iPad, Primary Schools need to complete the simple sentence below and make sure that they sign up for Learnanywhere by October 31.
HOW TO ENTER
To enter the prize draw, simply sign up for Learnanywhere by midnight on 31^st October 2010 and complete the following statement in no more than 15 words:-
“Learnanywhere is the best choice for primary schools because…
To submit your entry please visit the link below and paste your answer into the ‘message’ box.
Competition to win a £400 ipod
The winning entry will be drawn on November 5^th.