E-bullying campagn

[Dos_Box]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5210886.stm

 

This is the same article as is on the homepage. I predict much faffing over this, and I like the way the govt is hinting that we buy in expensive systems to keylog, monitor, rrecord everything.

Scary, scary scary (not the legislation, but the work involved).

[indiegirl]

mmm, I was very nervous when reading this as well.

 

I particularly like:

 

"Every school should account for cyber-bullying in their compulsory anti-bullying policies, and should take firm action where it occurs."

 

You can account for it and write it in, the proof is sometimes much harder (without the aid of keloggers, monitoring software).

 

The problem we have (and undoubtedly everyone else suffers too) is where do you draw the line?

 

The other week I was involved with a case of cyber-bullying and it turned out that the bully wasn't even in school when sending emails, abuse etc... but the parent of the victim still blamed the school for giving them internet access! (omitting the fact that the child had 'net access at home too).

[GrumbleDook]

Yep ... we have this too

 

We are looking at creating a walled garden for the students to use, but we have to remember that a chunk of the other people students want to talk with are not at the same school ... so a walled garden would not work ... unless it is a county / region wide walled garden .... and then you get the politics and finances that go with it all ...

 

And the idea gets shelved again.

[Dos_Box]

I thinks it is a typical New Labour 'Technology will solve everything' solution, that like always does not take reality into account.

[crc-ict]

Yep ... we have this too

 

We are looking at creating a walled garden for the students to use, but we have to remember that a chunk of the other people students want to talk with are not at the same school ... so a walled garden would not work ... unless it is a county / region wide walled garden.

 

The county-wide plan hits a snag too - one of my schools is near to a county boundary, and a neighbouring school at most two miles away is a different county. And the way things work around here with getting school places, some of the children from one might very conceivable live in the same streets as children from the other and be friends out of school. It's a very difficult problem to think of a solution to which will please everyone.

[Ric_]

It's nothing new this and it's something that we have all had to include in our AUPs and policy documents for years.

 

Blocking of webmail, chat-rooms, etc. and providin an equivalent service hosted by the School, which can then be monitored is the way forward IMHO. After all, you cannot block exposure completly.

 

There is also a degree of common sense involved and educating the little darlings to protect themselves online.

[steve]

This 'news' story has p*ssed me off no end. :x

 

Another politician jumping on a bandwagon - we must protect our children - bound to get headlines.

 

The evidence is from a survey of 92 kids in london spread over 20 schools. I've read the full report, its bull, any decent statistician would have thrown it out. Thats 92 surveys from nearly 3.5 million kids 11-16 . Only 6 kids reported being cyber bullied more than twice. Just 4 kids bullied in school by email or instant message. And the impact of this cyber bullying is very low (according to the kids).

 

Most of the bullying is done outside school control - phone, text, picture message, home computer. No way can we control this stuff. 80/91 kids say banning phones and email etc in school would have no effect.

 

Kids are evil, they will hurt each other wether its with a brick or an email.

 

So the government will want us to waste thousands on stopping this, without having done any real research as to wether it is actually a real problem. Not only that, they'll just issue some half ar*ed guidelines that we should check kids emails.

 

 

[GrumbleDook]

I have to admit to posting a similar comment on the BBC site.

 

I spent 3 days trying to get information from Tescos about the materials from NCH ... and got nowhere. This ranged from several stores through to numerous departments in head office. The eventual answer was to go and grab a few packs from the local store when they are available.

 

NCH admitted that they were in the hands of Tescos and that we just have to be patient.

 

There are very few times when I want to receive spam ... but to be spammed about the materials from NCH / Tescos would not be a bad thing IMHO.

 

I will be looking to do a number of things with our website over the summer ... and one of them is a bullying message box. People can report bullying in whatever form they have experienced it ... in school or outside.

 

But this 'jump on the badwagon' by politicians ... for work that has been going on for sometime ... is annoying. Why jump on the badwagon now? The wagon has not only been loaded, done several trips, had a respray and had routes changed ... but it is close to being privatised and relauched using PFI.

[beeswax]

It was nothing to do with me either

[kingswood]

It's nothing new this and it's something that we have all had to include in our AUPs and policy documents for years.

 

Blocking of webmail, chat-rooms, etc. and providin an equivalent service hosted by the School, which can then be monitored is the way forward IMHO. After all, you cannot block exposure completly.

 

There is also a degree of common sense involved and educating the little darlings to protect themselves online.

 

Spot on.

 

[kingswood]

Yep ... we have this too

 

We are looking at creating a walled garden for the students to use, but we have to remember that a chunk of the other people students want to talk with are not at the same school ... so a walled garden would not work ... unless it is a county / region wide walled garden .... and then you get the politics and finances that go with it all ...

 

And the idea gets shelved again.

 

Have you looked at Securus? We are trialling it for two weeks in September- if you think it would help pop along and take a look around mid-September (should have some hard and fast results by then) and see what you think.

 

Paul

[GrumbleDook]

Tried it before at CTC ... nice kit and works well ... but doesn't cover home access.

[danIT]

Securus - how about the government or LEA takes a look at this and strikes up a deal with these companies. The price of this kit is appalling, we found securus very helpful for catching kids out, we tried it out for a month or so. However we could not justify the cost.

[kingswood]

Securus - how about the government or LEA takes a look at this and strikes up a deal with these companies. The price of this kit is appalling, we found securus very helpful for catching kids out, we tried it out for a month or so. However we could not justify the cost.

 

Yeah- I have a feeling the cost will be prohibitive for us too- around £8000 I am told!

 

8O

[GrumbleDook]

With a little funding such a system could be coded from scratch ... unfortunately that will not happen as it cuts out competition of providers of security and can be viewed as anti-competitive.

 

The usual example of this becoming a cluster-fsck is that of BBC learning content 9government funded) leading to eLCs to be spent with naff companies because the government is funding / creating resources that mean you don't have to by stuff from others.

 

Just mention this sort of situation to people over at Schoolforge-UK and you will get a more indepth analysis of how pants it is.

[thom]

We tried Securus & Policy Central

Policy Central was far superior and easy for others to monitor. To manage Securus you had to log in as Administrator - that's right, not a member of the Admin group but the actual domain administrator. I disabled him a long time ago following reccomeded security guidelines and when I spoke to Securas about that they didn't seem to understand me or be flexible enough to consider changing it.

 

Basically they work by having different libraries of words e.g. one for bullying, one for racism, one for swear words, etc. It will monitor everything on the screen not just internet stuff. On our 2 week trial we came up with numerous issues including one girl writing a letter in MS Word saying she was going to run away from home.

 

It looked really great but is £5000 + 1000 a year for support/upgrades (cost is £15 a PC I think). Policy central is supplied by Forensic Software. We spoke to Colin Dean ([email protected])

[woody]

@Thom, there must be a unique problem at your school with securus. But don't worry, we have had unique problems too. We have purchased securus and have been runnung it for about a year now. I don't need to log on as the domain administrator to run it, although I am a member of the Domain admin group.

 

Securus has been great for us. We have picked up bullying by email, printing off of offensive documents in word, Porn viewing on t'internet, etc. There is a lot of time involved though. I'd say if I where to look at 100% of all logs, it would take up around an hour a day or maybe more, and we are a small school - 500 pupils. But you do get to know which phrases to look out for, and you can filter out those which you feel will never pick up missuse.

 

As has been mentioned though, securus obviously will not monitor any abuse on home PCs. If an abusive email is picked up in school, fine, but not from home pc to home pc.

 

And as to how to stop abusive mobile phone calls and texts, I would like to see any solutions as to how we can monitor those. In fact, you are really relient on the victim speaking up as said in the news article.

 

All in all though, I agree with what has been said that you can't rely on a survey of less than 100 pupils and apply that to the whole country. Maybe we should conduct our own personal surveys of the whole school and act according to what we find at a local level?