As a parent or teacher, seeing your kid or student on Google Docs is a good thing, assuming they are just doing their school work when they could actually be in a group chat with their friends.

To make a group chat, it really would not be hard because students share documents for projects already, and since some teachers do not allow cell phones, this makes students more tempted to start a group document to have conversation on. On here students can share pictures and text.

For example, in New York City, a school had been monitoring their systems and discovered how many groups of students had been using Google Docs as a “secret chat room” for unsuitable content, and cyber-bullying.

According to Titania Jordan, with Bark Technologies,

“Sexual content can be found, expressions of depression, anxiety [and] even drug deals can go down… At Bark, we’ve seen over 60,000 instances of children using that platform to cyberbully one another…In other cases, kids create private, digital ‘burn books’ and invite others to contribute while leaving out the teased child.”

Some schools do decide to monitor what is going on, but without it, it makes it very easy for students to delete their content without a trace. It is important for teachers, administration, and parents to be aware of the possible risks associated with online mediums that students are using today in an effort to help protect students and encourage them to use technology for positive purposes.

https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/google-docs-being-used-for-cyberbullying-school-monitoring-services-say/2010099537

https://offspring.lifehacker.com/how-kids-are-using-google-docs-to-bully-each-other-1833151374