You will want to watch and smile over this video of a 1981 San Francisco area television report describing the early use of online media. Illustrating how far we have come in the connected world, it’ a great video to share with the digital kids in your family! Charming and quaint and posted over at Wimp.com. Enjoy!
N.B This video requires Adobe Flash so the video does not work on an iPhone or iPad.
Blogging can be a solitary endeavor, so it’s exciting when another cool website publishes a blogger’s thoughts and ideas. Over the past several weeks I’ve had two blog posts published over at A Platform for Good (PFG), a part of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI).
PFG aims to encourage parents, kids, and educators to connect with one another and think about “doing good” in the digital world. The website and the blog focus on a range of interesting topics with lots of ideas on digital parenting, learning, growing up in today’s world, and many other authentic opportunities — all great for us to have access to in a connected world.
Read the excellent blog post by Sue Scheff over at A Platform for Good. In Digital Resolutions for Parents, the author reviews some of the 21st Century connected world parenting resolutions that parents will want to consider implementing as families move into 2014 digital life.
Scheff offers some good suggestions to help children and adolescents (and their parents) stay safe, learn more, and develop savvy digital street smarts.
If new gadgets and devices have arrived in your family it’s not too late to check out the holiday contract cards over at A Platform for Good. You can use the cards, take the language and organize on your own paper, or personalize the cards themselves them a bit. These cards are a wonderful resource that can help family members get started in 2014 with clear and well-stated digital life expectations.
If you are searching for more information on digital age contracts to use with children and their digital devices, check out the contracts and agreements page on this blog. It lists everything on the topic that Media Tech Parenting has discovered on the web and judges to be a worthwhile resource.
I just discovered and took the quiz, How Millennial Are You? over at the Pew Internet Research Center website.
The questions cover digital-age habits such as reading newspapers, using mobile phones, and watching television, as well as a fair number of lifestyle issues. It’s interesting to do, and the score places each quiz-taker on a continuum with a range of generations from people in their 70s and above (called the silent generation) to boomers and down through millennials.
Once you answer the questions and get a score, it’s possible to change answers and see how the score changes. A quiz-taker can also look at graphs that depict how various generations of test takers fared in a more scientific survey.
This short exercise can help the parents of 21st Century kids develop a keener sense of how the behavior of various generations changes as digital life intensifies. Teachers may want to give the quiz a try because it can help them gain more insight into the lives of their 21st Century learners.
I scored 70, so I have a lot of digital-age millennial characteristics. On the other hand, despite the fact that my husband is digitally literate, he scored 30 (losing a lot of points for reading at least one newspaper each day and texting rarely). It was especially interesting to look at the graphs and see how we compare to other people in our age ranges.
Take the quiz, have fun, and learn.
Whenever I have conversations about the challenges of digital parenting, people invariably ask how I might condense all of the 21st Century parenting guidance into just a few helpful suggestions.
Can you get it down to the three most important tips, I’m asked?
I’ll admit that I’ve tried, on one than one occasion, to identify and condense the many elements that combine to strengthen digital world parenting skills, but the challenge takes an enormous amount of thought and even more time. Moreover, any short and succinct advice has to make it clear that we parents can no longer think about living our lives in two parts — digital and non-digital. If tips are distilled down to the basics, they still need to help adults recognize that our world changes constantly, and also that it requires us to continually learn from our children — refining our parenting strategies as we go along.
The good news is that one of my colleagues, Craig Luntz at the Calvert School in Baltimore, has come up with a three-part framework to help families navigate through changing expectations in the 21st Century world. When he works with parents at his school Craig offers the following three-part digital parenting plan. Continue reading “Three Basic — and Best — Digital Parenting Guidelines”
While I could not spend the entire day at the FOSI2013 conference, I joined the event around 1:00 P.M. after a morning at school and just in time for a terrific panel, Child Psychology and the Effects of Technology. Later I attended a session, Creating Trust on Social Networks, with panel members from the social media industry who described in some detail how vendors and social media sites strive to commit themselves to user support, troubleshooting, problem-solving, and integrity — in theory, above profit concerns.
As usual, each of the break-out periods featured two sessions — topics that I really wanted to attend but scheduled at the same time — so I had the difficult task of making choices. Because FOSI2013 provided a detailed schedule before the conference began, I arrived with a pretty good idea about which session related more to the issues that I am currently thinking about and coping with at my school. Still, making this type of choice at a conference is always challenging. I’ve tentatively arranged to get together, face-to-face, with local colleagues who also attended the conference and swap notes about the sessions that we missed.
I might mention here that during a break my edtech colleague, David, and I struck up a conversation with Patricia, a conference attendee and government official from Kenya. She had arrived just before the conference and was leaving almost immediately afterward. He asked her if she would be attending the FOSI2014 conference next year and invited her to plan a few extra days and visit his school. I chimed in and offered an invite to mine. Then we told Patricia that our independent school technology community is close-knit, and would welcome her at their schools, too.
To round out the afternoon, conference attendees all came back together to hear a group of experts discuss and distill some of the issues — privacy, digital citizenship, parenting, social media, connected life — that FOSI featured during the two-day conference. This was one of the most engaging conference activities, I think, because of the way the panelists — a journalist, an academician, a therapist, and a legal scholar — ranged back and forth over the topics connecting events and adding their own information.
Continue reading “Soundbites From Day Two of FOSI 2013 – Conference Post #3”
Some of these ideas come from researchers describing the results of various studies. Others come from presenters’ comments. My apologies for not connecting individuals with their comments.
I am drawing from my 30 pages of actual handwritten notes (handwritten because the seats were not a comfortable height for me to use my iPad).
In the Digital World
Teens Continue reading “Soundbites From Day One of FOSI 2013, Conference Post #2”
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