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In a media advisory last week, The Canadian Teachers' Federation announced it will hold its Annual General Meeting in Toronto next week, to discuss education issues including the impact of cyber-bullying on teachers and classroom learning.

"One of the greatest impacts on learning has been the creation of new technologies," says CTF President Winston Carter. "Despite the potential benefits of having electronic technologies more present in our teaching and learning environments, there is increasing evidence that they are becoming extraordinarily and unacceptably invasive. The use of e-mail, cell phones, text messages, instant messaging, and social networking Web sites are too often used to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviors intended toharm others. It's called cyber-bullying and it's a behavior that can spin outof control."

What is needed is collaboration, a co-operative effort by students,parents, teachers, law enforcement agencies, policy-makers and legislators to regain some control over the negative impacts of technology on the classroom in order to let our teachers teach and our children learn in an environmentsafe from any bully, including the emerging cyber-bully."