• Home |
• What You Can Do |
• Blog |
• Newsroom |
• Videos |
• Resources |
• Policies & Laws |
• En Español

Webinar: Orientation to the Revitalized StopBullying.gov Website

Speakers:

• Kaitlyn Harrington, HHS, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation
• Erin Reiney, HHS, Health Resources and Services Administration
• Deborah Temkin, U.S. Department of Education
• Achaia Walton, HHS, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs
• James Wright, HHS, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration

Description:

"An Orientation to the Revitalized StopBullying.gov Website," brings together members of the StopBullying.gov Editorial Board to provide a walk-through of the new StopBullying.gov website. Presenters discuss new changes to the site and how to use the content and resources provided on StopBullying.gov.

Transcript

Transcript for Orientation to the Revitalized StopBullying.gov Webinar May 21, 2012 Welcome to this webinar on our revitalized StopBullying.gov. My name is Dr. Deborah Temkin and I'm here to talk to you about who we are and why we have put this site together. We launched the new StopBullying.gov in March. The first StopBullying.gov website launched in 2011 when President Obama hosted the first ever White House conference on bullying prevention. He thought it was important to have a centralized resource for bullying prevention information online. The site is hosted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in partnership with the Department of Education brings together materials from across the federal government. Materials are produced by our federal partners and a group that consists of nine different Departments. We all come together because were so excited today to continue this effort to prevent bullying and put best practices out there. Why did we relaunch the site in April? Well we heard from many constituents that our site needed more on action steps everyone can take because we know that bullying will not be prevented and will not stop until everyone takes action. So our site now gives you direct tips on how to prevent and respond to bullying as well as an understanding of what bullying is, information about cyberbullying and how to get help now if all other options have failed. I'm joined today by several of my colleagues frop the StopBullying.gov editorial board who will help walk us through this site. We will take questions throughout, but we will only answer them at the end of the presentation. You can enter questions by entering the chat bar and selecting send questions to staff. Unfortunately may not be able to get to all questions today but we will answer as many as we can. Now I will turn the phone over to my colleague James from SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. If you don't know SAMHSA runs the lifeline which is a 24 hour suicide prevention hotline . Thank you I am James Wright and what we are going to do today is kind of navigate the website and look at how we set it up. Initially what we did when we relaunched this site, we looked at analytics from the original site and identified top tasks on our taskbar. This is our taskbar: What is Bullying, Cyberbullying, Who is at Risk, Prevent Bullying, Respond to Bullying, and Get Help Now. One thing we identified with this was we needed it to be a lot more action-oriented. We used some buckets and these are main buckets and you'll see when you highlight them such as definition related to ethics -- related topics, for cyberbullying, what is cyberbullying, prevent cyberbullying and report cyberbullying. So one way to find things is to directly click on the bucket. Let's take the bucket: prevent bullying. We see how to talk about bullying, prevention at school, and working in the community. You will see to the left, you'll see the main bucket, and those three and a sub sub bucket underneath with identified topics. One is prevention at school. Now, this is the direct way to search through each one of these buckets. The indirect way is to use the search tab. What you can do is type in a topic. If you want to know more about suicide and bullying you can search for suicide. Under this, what you Will find is pages linked inside of our website currently. This is information that has been vetted by the editorial board and you'll find there is a section on StopBullying.gov with risks, effects, and a PDF on working with young people who are bullying . It will take us to the page on effect and highlight how you got there along the side. And here is a relationship between bullying and suicide. This is the information that we identified related to bullying and suicide. Now I think it is time to look through the resource page. My name is Kaitlin Harrington and I am within HHS within ASPE, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and we are going to go over resources and this is another way to research for different resources throughout the page. In the upper right-hand corner you can find a link and I'll take you to the resources. On this link you will find both our policy for resources that we have on the page as well as nominate resources and search. If you want to look up something on cyberbullying, you can see if you click on one of the resources you see a brief description on what kind of resource this is as well as an arrow that will tell you if you are linking out to a nonfederal resource. On this page you can sort by title, type, contributor, or year and you can search by topic or eliminate you don't want to see things on prevention or just include schools or search by type, whatever material you're looking for as well as source type, nonfederal or federal, and then by date. Here you can nominate any type of resource that you are aware of. You'll need to first read our description on what we do accept, as well as include your name, e-mail, the title of the resource, author, link to the resource, and a brief description. Please note that listing a resource does not constitute an endorsement by the U.S. federal government or the member agencies of StopBullying.gov. Now we will turn this over to Kaya Walton from HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs who hosts this website. As James mentioned we previously used analytics for the site to create and build the site architecture for StopBullying.gov . Another thing we also want in really improving the site for the future is getting user feedback. One of the things we implemented is asking you for your input on every page and for every content of the website. As you can see you may have found this yellow box at the bottom ofevery page and this is a page level site survey. We are asking folks to give us feedback if you found information on the page you're looking at hopeful or not. If you found it helpful you click yes and we want to get more information as to what and why you found it useful, or why you did not find it useful so we can enhance that content. Another way to provide feedback is through a link at the bottom and this is our site level survey which gathers information about your overall site experience and talks about how your visit with StopBullying.gov went, how to improve the design and other things outside of page level content. We are looking for basically, once we have the data we look at it present it to the members of the editorial board and propose changes to content and really enhance how we present data and content of StopBullying.gov . Please take time to fill out either the site level survey or page level survey and look forward to hearing your feedback. As we go back to the homepage I want to go over briefly the way it is set up. The center is our billboard. These do change and we have four featured topics at this point. We do refresh these each week so please make sure to revisit the site to see what we are highlighting. On the what you can do section is highlighted topics as of today we have not changed these and these have been identified as key areas of what people are searching for. Right now we have the report cyberbullying, bullying & LGBT youth, what kids can do, bullying & youth with special needs and know the warning signs. And if you click on one of these it will take you to the warning signs page. If we go back the other things on the site are updates and featured videos. These videos we have identified and are linked from our old site. This is loaded through YouTube. This is the kids section and we are looking to make changes to this in August. Another thing you can get here is the get help now section and this does link directly to this topic. You can click on the hyperlink and it will take you to an outside resorce and that is suicide prevention than they do have information currently how you can help with bullying. One area that you can also search by is for your state policies and laws. The state policies and laws are announced on a memo that was sent out by education Secretary Arne Duncan at the end of 2010. At the end of 2010 he sent a memo that identified key components of state laws as they currently stand and I will bring up that page so you can see that we listed out these components. These are components that are currently in state anti-bullying laws and are identified asthings that make an anti-bullying law very comprehensive such as having a purpose statement, a statement of scope, having a definition of bullying,or a specification of prohibited conduct,enumeration of specific characteristics, having a provision to develop and implement an LEA policy, and specific components of those LEA policies. In December of 2011 the Department of Education released a report and it went through and analyzed every state law and it has been updated since that analysis came out. That analysis was based on laws of up to April 2011 to reflect current laws and for instance we know that Tennessee just passed a new law. And so we can actually go back and there are two ways you can find your state on the map, there's Tennessee and you can click that their law just passed to include cyberbullying And you can also see what terms are used in each law. The important thing to know is that each state is very different some use different terms and every state has a different definition. Tennessee uses harrassment and intimidatesinterchangeably and you can see Tennessee does not list specific groups and you can see key components they contained. If you forget what of any of these means you can click on them and it will bring us back to that key component page so you can read on what that component is. Now I will turn it over to Erin Reiney from HRSA to talk about how you can use this site as a practitioner. This is Erin Reiney from the Health Resource Services Administration, often called HRSA and what I would like to do is share with you some of the vision that I think the editorial board has for how folks can use this website. In case it's not clear to date there are a number of federal partners who have ownership in developing this content and we have three today here from Health and Human Services,HRSA, SAMHSA, the Department of Education, the Assistant Secretary for Planning Evaluation's officeand assistant secretary for public affairs as well as CDC, Center for disease control and prevention has also beeninvolved. I just want to make sure that everything we see today and on the site has been added and supported by all of those agencies. Let's talk about our hope for how people can use this site . For one second we would like to imagine a parent. We will call the parent Thomas and he has a son who is in fourth grade and he's getting a little nervous. He thinks that his son may be bullied. We will show you an image of our imaginary Thomas. Many of you might be a Thomas or have your own child who is suspected of being bullied. Certainly we all intersect in our community with people that have a child who may or may not be experiencing bullying. So let's imagine what those people might be thinking when they come to this page. We hope the person or parent would land is around here and that is called prevent bullying. They might say how do I prevent this and how do I even find out if it is happening. Click here on how to talk about bullying, we have a few examples of how important it is to keep that line of communication open and to really be in touch with the experiences of our youth. Scrolling through here, keep the lines of communication open, okay that sounds good but how do I really do that? We really want to encourage parents and adults in the lives of children that as little as 15 minutes a day is really reassuring to children. And it can be helpful having a conversation. Here are examples of conversation starters. We also have a downloadable resource of these conversation starters. By clicking on talking with children you can see, this is a resource produced originally from our friends at SAMHSA with with ideas about general questions. This is one resource that we have on the site. Another thing that the parent might do is go in and speak with someone in the school about ideas to make sure that bullying is addressed. So this person may click around and learn little bit and get ideas together so they can walk into the school and have a conversation and another thing the parent they do is click on policies and laws. Maybe if they are in the state of Colorado, what we have tried to do is make it easy to have the latest information and analysis of what kinds of state possibilities are out there in terms of addressing bullying. Let's move on, we know that there is a lot that parents are looking for on this site and one part of the community that can take advantage of this is the adults that work with children for an afterschool program. Here we have an example of someone named Mona and she runs an afterschool program and she is aware that the middle school has been looking at bullying prevention and they are trying to get activities going and she would like to be supportive in her work -- he is working with the same kids to reinforce these issues. She may go to the site. We are hoping that Mona will come on here and look at prevent bullying and how do Istart the conversation and she's thinking of how to help kids understand bullying . In the last one on here is watching them with and discussing. Then she might ask what is this exactly. Then she will find a discussion guide which is a series of questions that are designed to pair with according to this link the webisode. Each of these webisodes are designed -- each of these Webisodes are designed to having a model of bullying that are happening in the school and different ways to approach it. Here are a few resources at her fingertips and she can break these Webisodes up and use the questions in them and the potential answers. She can review some of these each week to put together a group game activity. This is another example. We know we have leaders and faith communities who are interested in doing something on this issue so we imagine, there is a youth pastor named Mark and he runs a youth group and would like to do something with this youth group associated with bullying. This might be an idea of what he might do. We think Mark might click around and learn a bit and at one point we hope that he would be able to use our search tool and say, I have high schoolers and I'm trying to build leadership skills so what if I am searching for leadership skills. The first thing that will pop up is a document called the leaders document toolkit. This is an example of a method where you can take teams and train the leadership team on how to work with younger youth over a number of weeks to develop a peer to peer program in the school to educate and raise awareness about bullying and how to handle it . There is one more story we want to imagine. We imagine someone named and she is the president of her Parent Teacher Association. She is here with her board or leadership team for the association and they know that bullying has been a hot topic lately in their community and they want to do something about it as a PTA. They're planning their agendafor the next meeting and want to know what can we bring to the table to have discussion on this. Going back to the site, we would hope that this PTA president would look and understand that the resources that they will find are going to be based on the latest research available combined with expert opinions and the best of the best information at the federal government is able to find on bullying. She can feel comfortable carrying forward this information to her community. This website can be mined for content to be used in a PowerPoint presentation in a community event. Another thing she can do is say it would be nice to have handouts and she may go to the resources tab and see if there is anything print ready that she can have. One tip for you on the webinar, when you go to the resources, without searching you can click here called view all, and you can see all the resources without having to filter them for search. You can always add a search term, but what she might do is going big and say I'm not sure what I want but I am looking more for tips than facts. I don't need a toolkit or training for a campaign. I do not need the research article, a podcast won't help and I don't need evidence-based program, and I do not need a webinar. She might say I'm going with federal resources because I think that's going to be what I am most comfortable with at this point and then you start to see a lot of interesting tip sheets and resources that relate to our site. She would probably say, positive youth development, I have heard that buzzword and I definitely think that is something that the school would be interested in. She can click on positive youth development and follow through and find information and read all about information on positive youth development and what the latest research says on that strategy. The other thing, you can find our tip sheets that are downloadable. We do have a number of them that are ready for print and able to be handed out like at a PTA meeting or town hall meeting. That is where she will find all those resources. With that I will pass that back over and I hope you can see how thoughtful we tried to be in imagining a different uses and needs of the community. I will pass it to Kaitlyn who will share more about how you can stay connected to us as we continue to grow and build this site. StopBullying.gov has a lots of social media efforts including an email listserv where you can prescribe for the latest updates of the site as well as related topics. And in addition you can go to our Facebook page where you can join the discussion on related discussions on the events and on twitter we will list the latest information they might be interested in. Here is our Facebook page. Currently have approximately 40,000 likes and constantly growing and we update this about 2 to 3 times a week. Topics will link you back to the website as well as on events that are going on. Here is the lower right-hand corner where you can subscribe to e-mail updates, Facebook, twitter page and our relaunch we haveactually have grown by 3500 more followers. In addition to both Facebook, e-mail and twitter, we also have our YouTube page where we will highlight videos. We also have widget and badges which you can take and add to your site. We also have a newsroom with the latest updates on bullying information which has been highlighted and we will have videos from conferences, meetings, educational purposes and various other videos that might be of interest. We will turn it over to questions in just a moment and there's a couple more things would like to point out. We hope the research on the site will help you to handle bullying in your schools and communities, but sometimes you need help immediately when all other strategies have failed. When you click on our get help page there's a guideline of where to call it you have issues that you can't address on your own. We know if someone is at immediate risk or harm, please call 911. Please utilize the suicide prevention lifeline, it is there to help. If you believe your school is not adequately addressing harassment based on race, color, natural origin, sex, disabililty, or religion you can reach out to both the US Department of Education office for civil rightsand US Department of Justice civil rights division and file a report. And you will be able to tell them what is going on in then they will work with you to find a resolution. We have been getting several questions in and we are going to start off with a very important question. Can you use these resources outside of the website? Are we allowed to print them off and use them at our presentations and in training? James will talk about how our resources are in the public domain. Absolutely. When you're using information such as the tip sheet which we highlighted, they are ready for production so you can print them off and use them and also link to our site as we showed, we have the widgets and badges and if you look at the get help now section there is a link to the right we will be adding a few more on the side and one thing that was underneath the lifeline site is find local resources. Any of this information that you see, you can either link to or print off and utilize in your community. One thing I would like to point out if you look at our about us section there is a policy on sharing information and please feel free to use this information. These bear with us as we sort through questions. Is this program directed for children or adults also? Our site as it stands right now is about bullying among kids and it's how we define bullying. What you can find out is if you're interested in resources on workplace bullying you can click on related topics and see that there are many other types of aggressive behavior that don't make the definition of bullying and if you go down here you can see workplace bullying. Adults in the workplace have a number of different laws that apply to them that do not apply to kids. You can see that we have addressed workplace bullying here and we do think it is a separate issue that require different resources/ This is under related topics and what is bullying . We have a question that said you mentioned you're going to make updates to the site in August of this year and someone asked what type of changes can we expect. One of the changes i looking to change the kids site and we do have a green button that says kids. That's where we hope where youth finds ourpage and click and go to and we do have good content for them in terms of what was so it's -- Webisodes and we hope that will make it more interactive and kid friendly. This is the place we are looking to do that and if you have ideas you can always connect back with us through these yellow boxes. We really will be reading these and they will be a good source of information to stay in touch and in tune with the field to make sure we are meeting the needs of the local community out there. When language includes harrassment based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability or relgion, how is this inclusive to LGBT victims ? It's important for us to start in our policy and law section and to read about what those federal law say. If you click on federal laws you get an understanding of what the federal laws are and you can actually see on our site we cover the question do federal laws cover LGBT youth. Federal laws do not directly cover LGBT youth who are harrassed based on their sexual orientation, federal laws cover everyone and that includes LGBT youth and title 9 prohibits discrimination based on sex. And harassment based on sexual orientation is often directed at their conformity to sex stereotype. In that case, harrassment can be covered under those federal civil rights laws and reported to the Department of Justice civil rights division. We have a question about tips on submitting resources so I will turn it back over to Kaitlyn to talk more about that. If you can go to the resources page on the upper right corner where you can link to resources, in the top paragraph you can see the resources that we take. We will look at government and nonprofit organizations as well as educational resources. And these resources must be related to bullying and use plain language and must not be products or opinions or be abuse in any way. we would suggest that you fill out this form and we will then review the resources within a couple weeks or so and be accepting or rejecting based on this policy. We had another comment asking if for purchase items can be listed on here and that is no, that is a research and we cannot include anything that is commercial product or service. If you are selling something we cannot put it in the resource database. Where is a resource that they can download webinars and tip sheets together? We have something under development that's exciting and we will add into the site in August and we absolutely understand as much as possible it's easy to download and run with the PowerPoint and so we are working on a training module for how to effectively walk into communities and give presentations on the subject and how to create community dialogue around that. These are called the system training modules in the community action toolkit. Look for those in August and another piece of that is about the resources in terms of hard copy. Many of theold stop bullyingnow webisodes have been brought into the new domain for does have for order, DVD toolkit that have the Webisodes and some flash drives that will contain all the tip sheets from the old stopbullying now website. We are absolutely looking to disseminate those. Anyone who would like to order can do that for free and they can be ordered at one 1-888-ask-HRSA. We have had several questions come in about how to find information about evidence-based program. Go to the resources section. If you click the view all, you will see evidence-based programs at the bottom. Uncheck all of them and click evidence-based program and you can find registry on which programs are listed. I will click on find youth info and go into the program directory and they are all programs that have some form of evaluated evidence and that means they have demonstrated to actually reduce the behaviors that they address. If you go into find youth info and click on the link, you can see a number of different programs that are listed and have demonstrated information on preventing bullying. This is the best way on our site to find evidence-based programs If you go back to the website and into the prevent bullying section there is a link within that links off to that program directory in our resource database. This webinar today is just one of the series webinars that are taking place on bullying. We will in June be looking at issues surrounding the evidence-based bullying and what it means to evaluate bullying and how do we know at a local level what is appropriate to implement in the community. You will see some similar announcements like how you found us here today come out or that webinar in June. You will also have the latest information on these monthly webinars by looking at in keeping updated on StopBullying.gov and continue to advertise these webinars through the site. We look forward to staying connected with you that way. What about bullying among early childhood kids? We know that went aggressive behaviors take place among early childhood it does not necessarily constitute bullying. They may not know the consequences of their actions with bullying and under what is bullying, we have a page on early childhood. We also have two episodes -- Webisodes dedicated to early childhood and these are specifically targeted -- targeted with youth on five day years old and it's helpful to start conversations on why it is good not to bully. Are business presentations available for archive purposes? Yes it is available and you will receive information with the archive event as well as the closed captioning. That will be made available to all attendees. Is there material or other materials in other languages? This is something that we are looking to do in the future but at this time we do not have materials in other languages at this point. Please continue to submit your questions. I think we covered most of the questions that have came in at this point. There was a question, talking about reporting incidents with Cyberbullying. You can see on this page there are several important steps to take and who to talk to afterwards. First you do not respond to or do not forward any type of messages. You keep an electronic record.That's one of the benefits of, it could be a benefit of something happening where a record can be kept is there's evidence of this happening and always block the person who is Cyberbullying . There are ways to report Cyberbullying and most online service providers, twitter, Facebook or online chat services, they have terms and services and a way to report violations. Is important to contact the revelant status provider. Occasionally it might be against the law and there are a couple states that have now criminalized cyberbullying and there are certain types of cyberbullying that are against the law always. It's important to know when to report Cyberbullying to law-enforcement and it's also important to report it to schools. Many do have policies against cyberbullying and kids that are cyberbullied are often bullied in real life as well. There is a question about resources for Native American use. You can see there is a number of resources for different groups. Unfortunately the research effort is not very thorough in terms of identifying different perspectives for different groups but if you scroll down what evidence there is we have visited on the site and under race ethnicity and national origin there is some material developed by our partners at the indian health service . I think that concludes our webinar for today. As Katie mentioned we will archive and post it on our website to view at a later point. Thank you so much for attending today and if you have further questions please fill free to add them to the webinar. We will leave it open for the next few minutes and archive those on the website. Thank you so much.