Social Networking and Students: A Bad Mix?

May 17th, 2010 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Teachers' Corner

The teen years are full of drama and staring at one’s self in the mirror – for hours. It’s also about socializing. When I was a teen, I remember sneaking up to the den to make a covert phone call to a boy late on a school night. We had a code: one ring and hang up meant call me. It drove my parents nuts.

Now as a parent, I race my daughter to the bathroom in the morning and I feel around her pillow at night for the contraband cell phone.

Cell phones. The fact is, kids are wired. I’m not talking junk food and Red Bull. In their dramatic teen way, 85 percent of our secondary students have a cell phone and they insist they’d just die without it. It’s their social outlet and nearly half of the kids in our school hallways say they their cell phone is the key to their social life.

And teens love to text and spend about 90 minutes a day doing it, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation Study. They love it because it’s fast (42%), it’s stealthy (33%), and it’s fun (29%). (Harris Interactive, 2008) The problem is that over half of your students are doing it at school (65%). What’s worse is that a third of your class has used a cell phone at least once to cheat on a test (35%), yet they really don’t think it’s cheating (23%). (Common Sense Media, 2009)

Despite the trouble with cell phones, few recommend that students not have them. Teens report that they carry their phones everywhere with them not just to communicate, but for safety reasons (78%). They call someone for a ride (79%), call to help a friend who is in trouble (33%), and call for an emergency (18%). Cell phones are both a blessing and a curse. (Harris Interactive, 2008)

Social Networking. Social networking and cell phones are a closely tied. One-third of the nation’s secondary students have a smartphone that can browse the Web. When they’re on the ‘net, almost half of them are on a social networking site. (Harris Interactive, 2008)

When they’re on the computer, it’s likely they’re on a social media site, too. Ninety-two percent of kids socialize online and over half have made new friends online. Of those who have an online social life, just 1 in 4 are friending their parents. (Norton Online Living Report, 2009)

Despite friending their kids, parents have a tough time monitoring their children’s’ Internet use. Seven in 10 parents have Internet rules and their kids say they follow these rules 80 percent of the time. Most parents think it’s their responsibility to monitor their kids’ Internet use (90%) and 70 percent of them talk about online safety with their kids. But parents struggle with this (33%) because the Internet and other digital technologies weren’t around when they were kids.

We’ve all read the stories of cyberbullying and it is certainly a problem. About 30 percent of teens have reported being the victim of some kind of cyberbullying and about half have seen it online. Most of the cyberbullies knew their targets personally (84%), but just one in three victims knew who was bullying them. Over the course of a year, almost one in five secondary students were directly involved in cyberbullying. Of those kids, twelve percent were bullies, four percent were victims, and three percent were both. (Hinduja and Patchin, 2009)

Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin, who run the Cyberbullying Research Center (http://www.cyberbullying.us), recently did a study and found that 1 out of 5 students reported contemplating suicide and about that many had actually attempted it. They write that their findings mesh with other suicide studies. When looking at bullying, they found both victims and aggressors were more likely to attempt suicide than their non-bullying peers. Victims of traditional bullying were 1.7 times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide and victims of cyberbullying were 1.9 times more likely to attempt it. Traditional bullies are 2.1 times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide and cyberbullies were 1.5 times more likely to attempt it. Although these numbers seem low and almost identical, the study authors write that any suicide attempt is one too many. (Hinduja and Patchin, 2010)

One principal’s response

In Ridgewood, N.J., middle school principal Anthony Orsini sent an e-mail to all of the students’ parents to encourage them to stop allowing their kids to be involved in social media. “It is time for every single member of the BF Community to take a stand!” Orsini wrote in the e-mail. “There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site.” (Brody and Coutros, 2010)

Orsini recommended that parents take action to make sure their children weren’t on social networking sites. Told parents to close out their kids’ social networking accounts, install Parental Control Software, and keep the computer in a place where parents can monitor online behavior. He said parents should monitor their teens’ text messages online and make sure that all wireless devices are left at a central docking station at bed time.

Orsini wrote that middle school students are not ready to cope with cyberbullying and its negative effects. It’s not enough, Orsini wrote, to teach a student to be responsible online. Social media is uncontrollable and unsafe.

“[…]it is not worth the risk to your child to allow them the independence at this age to manage these sites on their own, not because they are not good kids or responsible, but because you cannot control the poor actions of anonymous others,” Orsini wrote.

My opinion

Our students are digital natives, a term that means they depend on electronic devices for almost all parts of their lives. They’ve never known a world where the Internet didn’t exist. Their cell phones are always at an arm’s reach and they spend a good portion of their day online. To take away their technology is to isolate them from their friends.

And let’s face it: they can just go to a friend’s house to login. In fact, over 1 in 5 students do just that. (Norton Online Living Report, 2009)

Parents and students expect our schools to prepare kids for the 21st century. Like it or not, online social networking isn’t going away. We can either embrace it or have it run amok, unsupervised and unchecked behind our backs.

Instead of powering down, we need to empower our students. We need to have the conversation about what they should do if they witness or are the victim of online aggression. Encourage students to print out the Web page as evidence and tell an adult. Keep inviting them to tell an adult and assure them that they won’t be lose their digital access if they do. Hinduja and Patchin found that 60 percent of cyberbullying victims do not tell an adult because they’re worried they’ll lose their online access.

The just turn it off philosophy doesn’t equip students to deal with the very real consequences of their digital world. Instead of turning off the technology, we should create a contract with students and outline our expectations on the front end. We need to be having the conversation every time we take our classes into the computer lab: don’t reveal private information online; you can be legally held accountable for nasty images and text you post online; if you ever have trouble online, tell an adult you trust.

Schools have a responsibility to prepare students for the world beyond our double doors. If you’d like to teach an entire cyberbullying unit, you need some scenarios for a discussion, or you want some examples of parent letters, I recommend checking out the free, extensive curriculum that Seattle Public Schools has developed. You can view it here: http://www.seattleschools.org/area/prevention/cbms.html.

Not only do we need to educate our students about social networking and online safety, but we need to educate parents as well. Instead of just having them review and sign the Acceptable Use policy, dedicate part of the school’s open house night or parent-teacher conferences to online safety. We need them to partner with us to make their kids safe at school and at home.

Taking away the kids’ devices isn’t going to remove the problem; the problem will just go underground. I would rather have open, honest discussions about technology use than to have students find ways to circumvent adults. I would rather figure out ways to employ responsible social networking in the classroom as an engagement tool as well as a model for how the technology can be used. It’s difficult and time consuming to teach the kids about responsible social networking. However, I don’t think pulling the plug teaches anything at all.

What do you think? Is social networking interfering with your ability to teach? Are the kids so focused on texting that they can’t focus on their textbooks? Should we tell the kids to close their Facebook accounts or should we use it in the classroom?

References:
Brody, L. and Coutros, E. “Ridgewood principal to parents: Get your kids off Facebook.” NorthJersey.com, April 29, 2010 http://www.northjersey.com/news/education/042910_Ridgewood_principal_to_parents_Get_your_kids_off_Facebook.html, accessed 5-13-10.

Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds. (2010) A Kaiser Family Foundation Study, January 2010. http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf, accessed 5-14-10.

A Generation Unplugged (Research Report). Harris Interactive, September 12, 2008 http://files.ctia.org/pdf/HI_TeenMobileStudy_ResearchReport.pdf, accessed 5-14-10.

Hinduja, S. and Patchin, J. (2009) Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press.

Hinduja, S. and Patchin, J. (2009) “Cyberbullying Research Summary: Cyberbullying and Suicide.” Cyberbullying Research Center. http://cyberbullying.us/cyberbullying_and_suicide_research_fact_sheet.pdf, accessed 5-14-10.

Hi-Tech Cheating: Cell Phones and Cheating in School. A National Poll. (2009) Beneson Strategy Group and Common Sense Media, June 18, 2009. http://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/Hi-Tech%20Cheating%20-%20Summary%20NO%20EMBARGO%20TAGS.pdf, accessed 5-14-10.

Norton Online Living Report. (2009) Symantec Corporation. http://www.nortononlineliving.com/documents/NOLR_Report_09.pdf, accessed 5-14-10.

Tags: aggression, computer, cyberbullying, digital, research, Technology in the Classroom, Website