Teens and Tech: Promoting Positive Use While Preventing Abuse
This training is designed for youth professionals and related personnel who desire a comprehensive understanding of (and action plan to deal with) cyberbullying, sexting, and other forms of unwise social media use. Apart from providing foundational research information about trends and patterns, it will cover relevant legal principles and provide guidance from the courts as to when to intervene in incidents that occur online. In addition, it will share recommendations for formal policy implementation and enforcement, as well as informal responses for all involved. With regard to prevention, we share key actionable strategies to help cultivate moral compasses, compassionate hearts, and resilient mindsets among the student population that we serve.
In addition, a consistent theme throughout will be that it takes a coordinated effort to shape and enhance the existing social and relational climate within to improve attitudes and behaviors across a community. Towards this end, we encourage professionals to marshal the powers of peer influence and culture to curtail peer conflict, harassment, and other problem behaviors. We will also discuss the very best practices in climate initiatives such as social norming, youth grassroots campaigns, peer mentoring, data-driven action plans, and multi-pronged policy and programming approaches by adults. The overall goal is to help youth professionals address key intrinsic and extrinsic components of youth development, not only to enhance achievement, success, productivity, and connectedness, but also to produce students who are safe, smart, honest, and responsible both offline and online.