Archive for the ‘Back-to-school digital reading’ Category
Posted by Marti Weston on September 17, 2011
When we adults were students, we learned to write content-filled essays and reports, introducing the important facts about a subject. We discovered these facts by using quality reference materials, often at a library.
With today’s digitized resources and websites a student follows roughly the same routine, but resource reliability is a significant issue. While it’s easy to find sites with information about a topic, identifying reliable and significant information is more of a challenge. The trick is to discover whether or not a site is a reliable resource.
Help your child determine the quality and reliability of a site before using it as a digital resource. The University of Maryland posts this short handout that explains how to go about evaluating a website.
Many sites appear to be real as well as reliable, but they are bogus. An entertaining website for you and your child to explore is based at the Western Australia Province Department of Education and features bogus websites designed to look accurate and authoritative. Except that they aren’t. Take a few minutes to explore these bogus sites.
Better yet, explore them with your children.
Posted in Back-to-school digital reading, digital learning, Evaluating Web Resources, online research, parents and technology, supervising kids | Tagged: bogus websites, digital resources, evaluating sites, online research, website reilability, websites | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Marti Weston on August 24, 2011
Check out the Techlicious website to read Picking the Best Back-to-School Laptop, a post by Suzanne Kantra.
Important Factors for Parents and Kids to Keep in Mind
- Weight
- Enough memory to complete the required tasks — think about what your child will be doing
- Processing speed
- Attractiveness and/or design (a big deal for some kids)
- Security at school if it a laptop travels back and forth between home and school
Other Links to Help You Learn about Purchasing a Laptop Computer
Posted in Back-to-school digital reading, digital parenting, laptops and notebooks, parents and technology | Tagged: buying guides, digital parenting, laptops, Notebooks and Laptops, Suzanne Kantra | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Marti Weston on August 3, 2011
It’s almost back-to-school season, I’ve just been asked for my opinion about home network filters, and I’ve answered the way I always do: protective software programs are fine, but limited.
Yes, filters keep a certain amount of inappropriate content away from children, but the problem of access is not solved simply by protecting home computers and networks. Over the course of a day or week a child encounters many other connections to the world wide web — on laptops, smartphones, iPads, computers, in other people’s homes, and maybe even at a parent’s office. Not to mention all of the inappropriate advertising…
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Posted in Back-to-school digital reading, digital parenting, online security, parent education, parents and technology | Tagged: Atlanta Constitution, Bill Husted, family conversations, filtering sofware, home networks | 1 Comment »
Posted by Marti Weston on April 9, 2011
Visit Copyright for Kids!
The other day I chatted with a parent about the concept of copyright. Both of us are concerned that digital kids understand very little about intellectual property. The free-for-all digital information climate ensures that children have considerable difficulty comprehending what belongs to whom.
Copyright laws are arcane, and even a bit crazy, but it’s critical to teach kids that protecting the intellectual property of others is important. With your child take the Copyright Challenge quiz at Copyright for Kids to see how much you know. When you finish the quiz check out these frequently asked questions about copyright.
Just as I started to write on the topic, I discovered an excellent blog posting, Copyright and Kids, by Brigid Ashwood over at the GeekMom blog. She did all of the work for me. The explanations are easy to understand, and her step-by-step conversation using the bicycle analogy is easy for any child to follow. Ashwood touches on all the significant issues and ends with a clear explanation of fair use.
Two Other Resources
Posted in acceptable use, Back-to-school digital reading, copyright, digital devices and gadgets, Evaluating Web Resources | Tagged: copyright, fair use, intellectual property, kids, Library of Congress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Marti Weston on October 31, 2010
If you enjoy this post, check out my August 2010 post about using online databases, Staying Ahead With Online Resources, about online data.
The next time you watch your child begin a web search for a school project or other academic activity, take a few minutes to observe more closely how he or she selects web resources. In Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content (this abstract site leads to a free PDF of the article), professor Eszter Hargittai and colleagues form the Web Use Project at Northwestern University, describe how students tend to place huge amounts of trust in the initial hits retrieved by search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
With first year students in a required writing course at the University of Illinois Chicago (chosen
because of its highly diverse student body) researchers conducted a written survey of 1060 students enrolled in the classes. Next researchers selected a stratified random sample of 192 students to observe in person as each student performed 12 specific web-based tasks. Learn more about a stratified random sample.
Interesting Observations
- To complete a web-based task, students usually went to a search engine.
- After search engines presented links, students tended to follow the first few links, apparently assuming that the first links in a search were reliable resources to pursue.
- When they looked at a list of provided links, some had difficulty knowing the difference between regular links and sponsored links.
- As they followed these links, students did not appear concerned about who authored the sites that they found (only 10 percent of the students commented about a site’s authors or the credentials presented).
- To complete tasks students relied on brand names, and corporate brands dominated.
- SparkNotes, an online version of Cliff Notes, dominated.
- For credible sources many students favored .gov and .edu sites as more credible sites.
- Many expressed trust in .org, because they are all not-for-profit sites, although these days just about anyone can get a .org web address.
- To verify information, less than half of the observed students consulted a second website.
Posted in Back-to-school digital reading, digital parenting, digital world reading habits, homework, parents and technology, research on the web, web research | Tagged: digital parenting, media literacy, online behavior, reliable information, searching, trusting resources, web search, web search engines | 1 Comment »
Posted by Marti Weston on September 3, 2010
From ClipArt for Free.blogspot.com
The beginning of a school year is a good time for families to set limits, explain rules, and in general, clarify expectations about technology use. Getting started in the fall, when everyone is off to a new grade and a fresh beginning, encourages healthy technology habits.
Depending on the age of your children, you may want to accomplish some or even all of the tasks on this list, encouraging everyone to think responsibly and become committed digital citizens.
Nine Back-to-School Technology Tasks
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Posted in acceptable use, Back-to-school digital reading, cell phones, digital parenting, media literacy, parent education, parents and technology, setting technology limits | Tagged: American Academy of Pediatrics, back-to-school, cell phones, homework expectations, technology, technology and bedrooms, texting | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Marti Weston on August 20, 2010
These days it seems like every person under 25 is walking around attached to earbuds. What are they listening to? Music on MP3 players — loud music. Over the years quite a bit of buzz has surfaced about teens and hearing loss. Moreover, pediatricians express ongoing concern and several past research projects (article links below) have identified the extent of hearing loss in adolescents.
Now just published research (abstract) by a team from Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital reports that the problem is serious and getting worse. 19.5 percent of teens may have hearing difficulties according to the study which used data up to 2005-06.
According to the Time Magazine article, the researchers studied teens age 12 – 19, and used data “… collected by the government’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), conducted over a six-year period in the 1990s and a two-year period more recently.” Read the Wikipedia NHANES explanation.
Good Links to Read on the Current Research and Several Past Studies
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Posted in Back-to-school digital reading, parents and technology, teens and technology | Tagged: Brigham and Women's Hospital, digital parenting, Hearing impairment, IPod, Massachusetts General Hospital, teens and hearing | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Marti Weston on August 17, 2010
For extra insight into the cell phone behavior of your preteen or teenager, take a few minutes to read these 2008 survey results from Harris Interactive, conducted with 2,098 teenagers in the United States. The survey was paid for by CTIA: The Wireless Association, an industry group. The results appear to be as timely today as they were two years ago. The Marketing Charts website depicts the results with emphasis points. Another cell phone and teen research survey, Teens, Cell Phones, and Texting, conducted more recently and published in April 2010 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an organization independent of industry interests.
The survey results make it clear to all of us — parents and teachers — that mobile phones and smart phones continue to be influential in the world of pre-adolescents and teens and will probably become even more so in the future. These mini-gadgets are permanently anchored in their social lives — and in ours.
A few data highlights from the Harris survey are below. Check the websites for the bigger picture.
Harris Interactive Survey Highlights Include
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Posted in Back-to-school digital reading, cell phones, interesting research, parents and technology, teens and technology | Tagged: back-to-school, cell phones, digital parenting, Harris Interactive, online social lives, teens, texting | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Marti Weston on August 16, 2010
September brings the start of a new school year, and once classes begin, it’s not long before the first research reports and projects are assigned. To get started, your child will head right to his or her computer; however, adult assistance can ensure that a student uses quality sources, thereby developing stronger research skills over the long run.
Just about any time digital children search for information at home, they fire up Google. While their teachers use substantial classroom time and energy introducing students to the best online research resources, children often need assistance applying the research lessons on their home computers. As often as possible adults should remind children that results from Google — as wonderful as Google searching is — provide a huge number of links, many of them of questionable quality. Read a comparison of Internet searches and online resource/database sources, written by a librarian at Monroe Community College, part of the State University of New York system.
A better way to search for information is to access library online resources and databases — the crown jewels of student research (Links at the bottom of this post will take readers to a few libraries that describe their virtual databases.) Searching in these databases decreases quantity and dramatically increases quality — which, in turn improves the caliber of a student’s assignment.
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Posted in Back-to-school digital reading, homework, online databases, parents and technology | Tagged: digital parenting, online databases, online research, parents and technology | 1 Comment »
