Friday, September 6, 2013

How your School can put a curb on Bullying and be able to deal with incidents faster

With a new year, you are bound to see bullying take place, you may even be a victim of it. You know you should probably tell a teacher or even ask the bully to stop, but sometimes, that can be very hard.
Everyone knows what it means to be marked as nark, looking back on it as a grown adult you'll end up thinking the whole fear of being a nark, was really stupid.

Statistically, only about 8% of school yard bullying ever comes across the administrations desk, because school supervisors can't possibly see it all, Then you have all those students who fear the social repercussions of being marked, tattletale.

If you're a teacher, student consider talking to your school about a smart phone application called TipOff it was recently rolled out as a pilot program in Hamilton Ontario. This app allows students, parents and even teachers to select their school and send a text directly to the school administration. This application scrambles the phone numbers so it remains truly anonymous. Thus far it's already caught a student who brought a knife to campus and intervened in school bullying.  It's gotten great reviews and I'd like to see more schools globally showing an interest in the app so it's in every school possible, sooner rather than later.

I think this is a great application, that could be a serious asset, face it students are going to text in class whether you ban cell phones or not. Might as well make it a truly positive thing.

You can browse this article about the app.
http://www.cbc.ca/hamilton/news/story/2013/02/05/hamilton-bullying-app.html
shout out to CBC for being awesome.

-H

2 comments: