A high school principal is rallying parents to fight some of the apps that many children have on their smart phones. They
are apps that enable kids to post anonymous, insulting, public comments
about other kids -- comments that amount to bullying. The principal is going to the heart of the problem: the hearts of the users. The
popularity of the apps that teens use to post those anonymous and
vulgar insults and gossip involving classmates often changes with the
weather. Today's "in" app is replaced the next day with another app.
And
a couple of days ago, the app that shocked the principal of Atlanta's
St. Pius X Catholic High School is the one called "uMentioned." He wasn't aware of it until some students complained to him about it. The public posts he then saw from other students, he said Tuesday, were "inappropriate" and "vulgar." So
on Monday, the principal, Steve Spellman, fired off a warning to
parents about the "explicit vulgarity" of the anonymous bullying that
the app was enabling. But here's where he took his solution a step further. After urging parents to delete the app from their children's smart phones, he then wrote in his email: "Please have a meaningful conversation with your child about using technology in a positive, ethical manner."
Because,
as Spellman said Tuesday, today's app of choice might be "uMentioned"
or "Yik Yak," but tomorrow it will be something else; and teens, he
said, need to realize that the technology is just a tool of their own
good or bad actions. "And I think our job as [parents and]
educators is to teach them how to be moral and ethical in the use of the
modern technology that they're going to use the rest of their life."
The
founders of "Yik Yak" say they are doing what they can to sanitize
their app, using algorithms, for example, to censor certain banned words
that some users post. "And we have this list of common names --
bullying words, racial slurs -- that will trigger something, and the
message will get deleted right away," said co-founder Brooks Buffington. Buffington
also says that, at the request of local schools, he is able to use GPS
data to disable Yik Yak in 85 percent of the nation's high schools and
middle schools.
Some St. Pius students are already posting
anonymous complaints, on the uMentioned app, about the crack-down begun
by Principal Spellman. "R.I.P. uMentioned," wrote one student. "Thank
you to the one-percent of students who decided to be mean," posted
another student, "so the other 99 percent who used this for fun are
probably going to get told by our parents not to use it."
Next,
Spellman is going to have a face-to-face with the 1,100-plus high school
students, talking with them -- not so much about apps that allow for
anonymous postings, but about themselves.
"Whatever they call it,
there are going to be these sites available" regardless of adults'
objections, "and I think that we need to share and educate these young
people in preserving the dignity of the human person."
http://www.11alive.com/story/news/local/2014/05/07/apps-umentioned-st-pius-apps-principal-spellman/8795529/
