Yes, it’s important to show how Bebo is abused by some users but how do you do that without demonising Bebo – and for Bebo please read any and all other social networking sites that exist and will exist in the near future. From media reports and staffroom gossip you’d swear only the depraved and dysfunctional use Bebo and to have a Bebo account is to be somehow unclean!

And there’s the rub! Or even the nub of teaching about Internet Safety. We warn about Bebo and lo and behold, it transmogrifies magically into Bete Noir and actually acquires a class of cool for all those “yoofs” and “emos” looking for another way to “beat the system” whatever that may be! So should we have mentioned it at all?

We tell about the dangers of chat-rooms, email, msn messenger, add your own here! Does this mean we are introducing new and more illicit ways for children to continue and even extend the bullying they may do in the yard, on the street? Is the Internet the modern Pandora’s Box releasing the all evils of mankind on the world but with no hope remaining!?

I don’t think so.

Strange how what goes around comes around for I see many parallels between the need to teach Internet Safety and the introduction of the Stay Safe programme many years ago. For that, the harbingers of doom predicted a flood of false accusations, an increase in bullying, the introduction of inappropriate content to those of tender years and the end of civil society in general, among others!

Similarly regarding Internet Safety today, there are those warning that children and the Internet are a bad mix and even go so far as saying that turning on the computer wasn’t such a good idea in the first place either. It’ll all end in tears, or worse, up on YouTube, I tell ya!

Thankfully none of the former came to pass with Stay Safe and this has found a natural and appropriate home in the RSE programme of the new curriculum, itself the natural home, I would think, for the Internet Safety programmes being rolled out here and now.

And so the message we’ve got to get across to parents and teachers alike, is that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! Like it or not, anti-social behaviour such as bullying, cyber or otherwise, is here to stay, the Internet is here to stay and children are here to stay! Two out of the three ain’t bad, let’s keep it that way!
Gearóid Ó Duibhir
- ICT enthusiast, primary school teacher, journalist