As schools moved from their brick-and-mortar classrooms to the online, bullying followed suit too. Bullies don't lurk in the shadows of hallways and corridors now. Rather they are now harassing their victims in online chatrooms and social media platforms that can be even more dangerous. Cyberbullying is occurring in your Google Classroom.
What Is Cyberbullying?
Cyberbullying refers to the practice of sharing targeted negative content about someone through an online platform. This negative content might be texts, images, videos, audio, etc. The online platforms might be social media sites, remote classrooms, chat rooms, and such. The shared content might be personal or humiliating for the bullied person.
Formerly cyberbullying mainly took place on Facebook, Tiktok, Snapchat, Messenger, or other widely used social media platforms. Most of the instant messaging, direct messaging platforms are common sites of bullying. A bully might send threatening messages to the victim or share some embarrassing content about them.
With the rise of online education and classrooms, the culture of bullying has found its way into this sector too. Bullying in remote classrooms such as Google Classroom is becoming a serious problem nowadays. Many of the modalities of these remote classrooms are dependent on text and videos. And the bullies are using this to their advantage.
In remote classrooms cyberbullying commonly occurs in Google Hangouts, Google Meets, and even in shared Google Docs for a class project. Cyberbullying in these areas can seriously hamper a student's learning and lead to bad performance. If unchecked, cyberbullying can lead to a psychological trauma and even suicides in severe cases. So, it's important to look out for the signs that indicate that your child is being bullied online.
3 Signs That Your Child Is Being Bullied Online -Cyberbullying Is Occurring
The first step to prevent cyber-bullying is to identify its signs. Teachers should look out for the following cyberbullying warning signs for the well-being of the children they are responsible for.
The Child Wants To Keep The Camera Off During Class
When students share the same screen during online class the inequality in living situations becomes apparent. Some might be sharing rooms with other family members who keep appearing in the back. Or, the overall condition of the room might be poor. As a result, other students get encouraged to bully them regarding their socioeconomic status.
In such cases, you might notice that the student in your Google classroom prefers to keep their camera turned off or makes up excuses to not use the camera. This is an important warning sign that cyberbullying is taking place in your classroom
A Regular Student Is Becoming Irregular All Of a Sudden
Students who suffer from bullying tend to detach themselves from the classroom altogether. Because that might become the only way for them to avoid bullying. Eventually, you will notice an unexplained decrease in the quality of their class performance.
So, if you notice a formerly regular student becoming irregular in their school work or showing reluctance to attend a class, you can take that as one of the major cyberbullying warning signs.
Complaints From Parents
Have a chat with the parents if you suspect a certain student is being subject to cyberbullying. Ask the parents if they have noticed any unusual behavior in their child. Such as spending more time or less time on the internet than usual.
Parents might also tell you that their child has been angry, frustrated, scared, or depressed recently. In that case, ask them if the student has been acting like this since the online class started. If you can find the connection, take the necessary steps to stop the bullying.
How Can You Stop Cyberbullying In Google Classroom?
To stop cyberbullying in your classroom, more control over the chatting, image sending, and video sharing options in the Google Workspace is needed. One of the ways to control them is by Google Extensions that work to limit the functions of Google Workspace for Education. Some essential functions of the extension would include blocking chatting in Google Meet, offensive images, document video searching, and offensive emojis.
These extensions can make the environment of your Google Classroom safer and increase the overall performance of your students, and a prime example of them is Safe Doc created by xFanatical.
Conclusion
Cyberbullying is a serious problem on the internet. In online classrooms, remote learning can be severely hampered due to this issue. So, the teacher needs to be more careful and take the necessary steps to stop this from happening. We hope that the cyberbullying tips for teachers we’ve provided helps you bring an end to this horrible occurrence in your classroom.
