Sam’s blog

After reading Tim’s post on social networking, I was reminded of the Current Affair item on the same issue. Tim speaks of the popularity of social networking sites such as myspace and facebook amoung children. Schools have begun banning these sites from their computers, however, they cannot prohibit them from using them out of school.

It is often in this time that the problems arise with students being bullied through their blogs. Children have been insulted, ridiculed and had others hack into their accounts. This is a new form of bullying that parents and teachers are not familair with and cannot deal with in the usual way.

As i mentioned in my earlier post cyber bullying is not limited to school, and follows children home. Parents need to become more aware of their children and how they are using the internet. Carol A. Josel provide some tips for parents on how to become more aware with this issue. A good suggestion she had was that parents become involved in the programs their children use. This way they can see what their children are doing and children will be aware that a parent is watching.

I also found a site called imbee it is a social netwroking site for children that requires the permission of the parent for a child to sign up and can be used in a classroom environment. Hopefully, such a program can be used to reduce the number of students on myspace and facebook, as these sites are not really suitable for children with some of the content that is available.

However, a big issue with these sites remains that if children are not allowed to use them, they will become curious and want to more, perhaps rather than prohibiting their use, students should be better educated on how to use these sites and the risks of using them.

A good site i found relating to this and providing good information for children, parents and teachers is Australian Government Net Alert. I think education is the key to social networking as it has only become popular recently and it will most likely become more and more popular. It will not go away so rather than try to stop children from using it we should all educate ourselves about it and learn how to use it safely.