Month: April 2011

Posted in digital parenting, family conversations, parent child conversations, parents and technology, podcasts

5 Podcast Series that Teach About Technology

Posted on by Marti Weston

Parents with digital kids like to keep up with technology and stay as up-to-date as possible. One way that I keep up is to listen to technology podcasts — radio programs, really — except that they are downloadable and portable. Some podcasts start out as radio or TV programs and then they are uploaded as podcasts after the broadcast, however, most podcast hosts record their programs specifically for uploading to a website.

I’m a regular podcast listener. Every week or two I download various episodes to iTunes and from there it’s easy to sync them onto my phone. It’s convenient to listen to “casts” in the car, during my exercise sessions, or simply when I am walking from one place to another. I just need to remember to have headphones handy.

Podcasts are a great way to learn on the go, and they can help parents get started with those all-important digital conversations.

To get you started, here are a few of my favorites. Continue reading “5 Podcast Series that Teach About Technology” →

Posted in digital citizenship, digital devices and gadgets, family conversations, parent child conversations, parents and technology, setting technology limits

7 Constructive Comments: Digital Kids to Parents

Posted on by Marti Weston

With more than 30 years in teaching including more than 20 in the educational technology field, I’ve heard many kids reflect thoughtfully, and not so thoughtfully, on their parents’ digital skills.

Here are the seven most common “I Wish” statements that I’ve heard expressed by children over the last 16 or 17 years. Two of them my daughter expressed directly to me.

Kids wish … Continue reading “7 Constructive Comments: Digital Kids to Parents” →

Posted in digital citizenship, digital parenting, online security, parents and technology, when to give children email

Giving Kids E-mail this Summer? 5 Tips for Parents

Posted on by Marti Weston

What is the right age for children to get personal e-mail accounts? Most of us discover, usually in hindsight, that a child’s independent e-mail account changes the context of many childhood experiences and complicates our child-rearing concerns.

E-mail connects a child to the world in ways that we parents may want to postpone. Chain mail, spam, the occasional unkind note, crazy stories, and the appearance of strange links — all are experiences that cannot be avoided, even with the best parental monitoring and regular family discussions.  Complicating the situation are the regular and age-appropriate conversations children have with one another, talking about odd and unusual electronic encounters. It’s wise to chat with teachers at your child’s school because they observe digital interactions that are different from what parents see.

Hundreds of digital options — e-mail is only one of them — are available and waiting for your child to discover them, so in the final analysis, you cannot prevent digital access. You can, however, make decisions help you focus on educating your child about digital citizenship.

5  Options to Consider When Your Child Asks for E-mail Continue reading “Giving Kids E-mail this Summer? 5 Tips for Parents” →

Posted in digital citizenship, digital parenting, parents and technology, privacy, social media

Do Your Kids Take Online Surveys and Quizzes?

Posted on by Marti Weston
A Quick Google Search for Quizzes

For sometime now I’ve considered writing a post on the problems with web surveys and quizzes. These tricky techniques use old-fashioned fun, emulating the magazine quiz features of the past and encouraging web users to happily divulge all sorts of personal information. Each of these activities is a small privacy invader using a “have fun and learn more” guise.

Instead of writing more on this subject here on MediaTech Parenting, I suggest your head over to visit the I Look Both Ways blog, where Linda Criddle has posted Online Quizzes and Surveys and the Real Risks These Represent. Linda’s post offers a comprehensive overview of the subject along with supplemental images.

Continue reading “Do Your Kids Take Online Surveys and Quizzes?” →

Posted in digital parenting, healthy media images, media literacy, parents and technology, technology support

Location, Location, Location (Services, that is…)

Posted on by Marti Weston

A tech-savvy middle school parent sent me the link to the video at the end of this post. She added a comment: “This is scary. Should I let it upset me?” As of mid-April 2011, according to YouTube, the video has been viewed nearly 2.8 million times

There is nothing quite like the queasy feeling a parent gets when a media outlet airs a story with shrill content that aims to frighten and questions the safety of their children. In this case, the report included a solution at the end of the news segment, but by then many viewers were probably too upset to focus. YouTube makes it all so easy, and we can view the segment again and again and then pass it on to others. If each of us had more media literacy skill, we’d hit the stop button, move on to something else, and not even think about forwarding it to our friends.

Specifically, this video addresses two concepts: geotagging and location services on smartphones. Setting aside the anxiety about the information revealed by digital pictures, the video highlights a critical digital-age dilemma for parents: how to develop basic knowledge about the digital devices that they purchase for their children. Location service happens to be the current concern, but by the time the next round of must-have gadgets arrives on the scene, another issue will emerge. Knowledge is power.

Continue reading “Location, Location, Location (Services, that is…)” →

Posted in data collecting, data sharing, digital parenting, media literacy, parents and technology, social media, social networking, teens and technology

Quiz: How Much do You Know About Social Media?

Posted on by Marti Weston
Take the quiz!

To get a sense of how much you really know about the social networking world and the movers and shakers who are actively developing and tweaking it, take a social media quiz. The Big Social Media Quiz over at the Liberate Media website.

A user needs 70% to pass this quiz, and though I know all sorts of minutia about social media, I only answered 50% of the questions correctly. Sigh!

Liberate Media is a PR firm with social media expertise.

Posted in acceptable use, Back-to-school digital reading, copyright, digital devices and gadgets, Evaluating Web Resources

3 Copyright Resources: Teaching Digital Kids to Respect Ownership

Posted on by Marti Weston
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.

Two Other Resources