• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

‘Delete Day’: Students putting messages that matter online

May 6, 2011 By Anne Leave a Comment

Today (5/6/11) is “Delete Day” at the Mary Louis Academy in Jamaica Estates, N.Y., a day the students themselves decided last fall to organize. And that is what’s meaningful about this “online safety” initiative: It’s their own. It started last October, when – as part of this Catholic girls school’s public-service education program – sophomores, juniors, and seniors participated in a “Take Action, Advocacy, Leadership One-Day Conference.” After giving a keynote about “safety, responsibility, respect, and reputation management within online and offline communities,” Alison Trachtman Hill of Critical Issues for Girls offered the student “service-learning teams” some “ideas and strategies to create youth-led change in their community” and a “Take Action” template for the teams to use, Hill writes in her blog. But I think the most important thing she did was this: “I spoke to them about their power and responsibility to change the culture at their school, because so often youth don’t feel like they have the power to make change, when the reality is that they are the only ones who can!!” she later told me (I totally agree – see this). The students decided they needed to “create a culture of inclusivity, dignity and love within their school community, using Gandhi’s quotation “My life is my message” as the theme, adding their own tagline: “Make yours a message that matters.” [I think “My life is my message”– applying our critical thinking to that as we use social media – is the very essence of new media literacy.]

Acting on that tagline, for Delete Day today, the organizers are staffing a room in the school where fellow students can go during lunch or a free period to delete messages that don’t matter (or are destructive), including mean gossip, wall comments, inappropriate photos, unknown “friends” and contacts, etc. [For more details, see coverage at the Huffington Post.]

Maybe this great idea will go viral. Already, upon hearing about Delete Day (before it happened!) in a risk-prevention group in which we all participate, New Zealand’s NetSafe.org.nz told us there will a national Delete Day in their country later this year. They told us they’ll be developing “a sort of virtual ‘Delete Day in a Box’ that a school could pick up and adapt for their context … ensuring the IT admin is on board so students can access otherwise blocked sites, developing student teams for different purposes, presentation templates for … staff or PTA prior to the event … possibilities for credit in some subject areas for student participants … draft press releases [for] before and after [for news reporters and for] including local businesses or appropriate agencies to sponsor [and] a national online collaborative space where students can share their strategies and successes.” NetSafe is considering piloting Delete Day with a single school “so we can create a short case study/video story or vlog that details one school’s experience to help publicize this great positive student initiative so others will join in.” Talk about inspiration!

Share Button

Filed Under: reputation, Risk & Safety Tagged With: "My life is my message", Delete Day, Mary Louis Academy, online safety, reputation protection, SEL, social-emotional learning

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Connect with me on LinkedIn
Follow me on MASTODON
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Safety by co-design: How we can take youth online safety to the next level
  • Much-less-social media on Facebook’s 20th birthday
  • What child online safety really needs, senators
  • Welcome to 2024!
  • Supporting the youngest witnesses of this humanitarian crisis
  • Should our kids learn how to use generative AI? Well…
  • The missing piece in US child online safety law
  • Generative AI: July 2023 freeze frame

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for toots on Mastodon or posts on our Facebook page, LinkedIn and Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2025 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.