In my schooling experience, the idea of educating about online interactions and uses fell into two categories: General Cyber Safety and Cyber Bullying. I found that both were spoken about frequently in my Health Education classes from around Grade 6 to Grade 9. However, when thinking back, I realize that these topics seemed to be discussed using quite different methods. Throughout the rest of this post I will dive deeper into each of these topics and how they were approached in my classrooms growing up.

Cyber Safety:

When discussing cyber safety, it seems that the methods of teaching were using scare tactics, with a little bit of education of proper use. The majority of the time teachers spoke about the audience your posts have. We were asked if the posts we made online would be something we would want “our grandma to see” or “a future employer to find”. Though these seem like pretty good rules of thumb, they were matched with scenarios that usually made me pretty nervous. For example, I had a teacher who talked about her “friend” that used to post pictures of herself at the bar doing things that she thought were cool at the time, but no longer sees them this way. My teacher then went on about how she later got hired in a really great position in her field of work, but was fired due to her online presence. As a 12-13 year old, the idea of being fired from a great job because of a silly post was terrifying. We later learned that this story was made up, but could happen in real life. It was used to show us that the online presence that we begin when we are young is permanent, as nothing on the internet is fully deleted. I see this as a type of ‘scare tactic’ that was used as an educational tool. It will always be in the back of my mind when posting.

Along with discussing our own posts, we talked about who we are friending online and the importance of private profiles. We talked about how people can pretend to be someone they are not, just by using someone else’s picture. This conversation often led to discussions surrounding online predators and human trafficking, which was always a conversation that made me uneasy. Usually during these lessons we would watch videos (like the one linked below) talking about the dangers of speaking with people you do not know online.

Though I did not see this exact video in school, it is quite similar to ones that were showed in the classroom.

Cyber Bullying:

Watching the videos from Wednesday’s lesson about Amanda Todd reminded me of the discussions we had in my Health classes about cyber bullying. We watched the video that was featured in the documentary of Amanda holding the note cards almost every year to begin the bullying and cyber bullying unit. This topic was approached differently from the way cyber safety was approached. Teachers spoke mostly about stories like Amanda’s, addressing the impact our behaviours can have even when we are behind a screen. Rather than trying to scare us, they brought forward tons of instances where bullying led to terrible things. I think the goal was to build empathy, discouraging us from partaking in these things. Along with these stories I remember frequently watching the video Artists Against – True Colours, which also talks about bullying.