Montevideo Elementary

Cyberbullying or online bullying is bullying through digital communication. The California Department of Education defines it as being “willful and involves recurring or repeated harm inflicted through electronic text.”

 

Examples of cyberbullying include sending texts or posting tweets or Facebook posts that are hurtful to another person. This can include threats, hate-motivated speech or insults. Sending repeated unwanted emails to someone can be a form of cyberbullying. In some cases, cyberbullies may assume an identity of a victim for the purpose of embarrassing that person.

 

All students, employees, parents and community members should report incidents of suspected bullying immediately. If you witness or suspect bullying, please complete the following fillable form and immediately forward to the school principal. An investigation will be conducted to determine if bullying occurred and corrective action needed.

 

 

It’s not a surprise that today we spend much of our time online for purposes of entertainment, managing our daily lives, research, shopping, study and hanging out with friends. What is less apparent is the personal footprint created by all that online interaction. This digital footprint is ultimately a public presentation that one day may be reviewed by colleges, future employers or really anyone who takes the time to do a Google search.

 

Some of the areas that leave a digital footprint include:

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapschat, YouTube – think that conversation or photo is private? Think again. It takes seconds to take a screenshot or save an online image, repost and/or share with someone else.

 

Web merchants and websites – Every time someone purchases something online or fills out information on a website, they are sharing information with the people who own that website.

 

Text Messages and email – Send a funny remark or photo to a friend? Once you hit send, it can go anywhere. Think before you click.

 

 

In school districts a primary focus of online privacy is protecting student data. School districts collect student data to inform instruction and provide aggregate information to the public. The following video shows how student data is accessed and used.

 

There are three main laws that govern student data protection:

1. The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) – protects the privacy of student records

 

2. The Federal Trade Commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) — requires any website or online service collecting information from children under 13 to post a privacy policy and identify what kinds of personal information it collects and how it will use the information.

 

3. California’s Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (SB 1177) places a prohibition on online services used for K-12 education, including: using data for targeted advertising, building a student profile, and selling and sharing information.

 

The San Ramon Valley Unified School District has a responsibility to protect the personally identifiable Information of its students, parents and staff from disclosure to unauthorized parties.  Therefore, SRVUSD has adopted and implemented security policies and internal practices to protect this information.

 

 

Technology has opened a world of creative ideas, images, music and video to today’s students. With a few clicks of a keyboard, it’s easy to access a wealth of resources that can be copied, pasted, saved or uploaded. It’s important that our students understand that there are laws governing the use and/or attribution of other’s creative work. We help our students learn how to navigate digital content by teaching them the basics of intellectual property — plagiarism, copyright and fair use.

 

Plagiarism is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as: “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own :  use (another’s production) without crediting the source.” Today’s technology makes it easy to simply copy and paste text. Sometimes students think that all they need to do is change a few words and they are good to go. Not true! It’s important to cite and appropriately paraphrase information. Plagiarism.org provides a helpful video to navigate and avoid plagiarism in today’s technology-rich information highway.

 

Learn more about avoiding plagiarism, citing sources and paraphrasing at www.plagiarism.org.