If you are a parent, teacher, or other adult working with children, this blog aims to help you learn, as much as possible, about helping digital kids grow into thoughtful, collaborative, and savvy digital citizens. The blog’s mission is to provide context for adults — defining and clarifying digital world issues, 21st Century learning challenges, and those virtual environments and devices that children take for granted.

It’s not really about technology anymore. Instead it’s about lifelong learning, collaboration, problem solving, and flexibility.

Media! Tech! Parenting! examines or reviews three or four items of digital news and information each week, surveying newspapers, blogs, research, and magazines, as well as the media, safety, and educational websites. Blog posts, as often as possible, provide links pointing readers toward the sites or publications covered in blog posts.

I am Marti Weston, the principal blogger on Media!Tech!Parenting! In my professional life I focus on learning in a K-12 environment along with all the digital world issues that challenge teachers, students, and parents. With more than 30 years of teaching experience I also support parents by teaching three-five digital education classes, leading question and answer sessions, and maintaining current resources on the school’s website.

My professional work centers on four areas:

• Coaching teachers and helping them develop learning environments that are rich with 21st Century collaboration and problem solving.
• Helping students learn to use digital tools appropriately, understand their digital dossiers, and move – carefully – along the digital citizenship highway.
• Providing teachers, students and their parents added context that helps them evaluate media and learn more about how media affect their world,
• Offering parents information about the always changing, fast-paced virtual world and suggesting effective parenting skills and strategies that will help children grow into stronger digital citizens

Please refer to the Disclosure Page for more information about this blog. When I review materials, books, websites, or other resources, I have no financial interest in any of them, and I have paid to turn off the advertising on this WordPress blog.

While today’s information-packed world presents unique challenges to families and educators, learning as much as possible helps all of us become more effective advocates for children. Much is good about the 21st Century digital world — all that information at our fingertips — but we must also be clear about the time-tested values — respect, honor, integrity — that we want our digital native children to accept and cherish.

One final note. If you have aging parents or elderly relatives in your life, you may also want to take a look at my blog, As Our Parents Age. This much older blog has a similar philosophy, encouraging people to read and think about aging issues, adult children, and of course, 21st Century learning.