With more than 30 years as a teacher including over 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 told me.
Kids wish their parents and other adults would:
Continue reading “Digital Kids to Parents: Please Learn More…”
Over a year ago I started this blog, MediaTechParenting.net. My aim was and is to organize, connect, and share resources on media, technology, and digital parenting — information that I encounter every day.
Over the course of a school year I often chat with adults about their digital kids. Most parents are enthusiastic, perhaps even astounded about the digital changes that occur every day in their lives. Yet, they also admit to feeling confused, worried, and even a bit befuddled. Often I find parents reflecting on how committed parents — who understand the importance of these digital changes — are supposed to keep track of the constantly changing digital landscape?
As a 22 year veteran in the educational technology world, I like to sift through articles, seek out references and discover resources that can help people — especially the parents of my students — understand more about the digital world. I read articles, watch videos, listen to stories, and keep an eye out for interesting research. It makes sense to share them on a blog. When I think about a post, I ask the question, “If I were a parent of a digital kid, what might I want to learn about?”
Dear Blog Readers,
This week I am in Philadelphia attending the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference along with more than 15,000 technology educators and school administrators — all of us thinking about how students and, yes, their parents and teachers, learn in the fast-changing digital world.
The exhibits feature hundreds of vendors (36 long rows in a vast hall), and we can choose to attend an array of keynotes, presentations, meetings, poster displays, student presentations, and demonstrations.
To share some of my experiences I have set up a new MediaTechParenting page, and I am blogging several times each day from the conference — my thoughts, ideas, observations, and more.
Back to more traditional posts late this week.
Marti
Read this thought-provoking post, Why Social Media Tools Have a Place in the Classroom, over at the GigaOM blog. Writer Ryan Kim goes into considerable detail describing reactions to a recent New York Times article, Speaking Up in Class, Silently, Using Social Media. Kim’s blog post then goes on to offer some compelling reasons why teachers (and probably parents, too) should examine social media more thoughtfully before rushing to judgement.
Wringing your hands over social media? Don’t.
Instead, use your energy to learn as much as you can. A parent’s goal is to develop enough knowledge to provide guidance and supervision based on significant family values, even as these media continue to evolve. Continued learning is always required if one aims to help children avoid potential pitfalls.
Thinking that social media will eventually disappear wastes time and energy.
Five Tips to Help You Get Going
1. Ask your child on a regular basis — and definitely without belittling yourself — to help you learn a new technology skill. Start with some of the easier web 2.0 interactive sites such as Wordle to make cool word designs or Diigo to save your bookmarks in a place accessible from anywhere. Keep learning.
2. Accept that social networking is not a fad and that life is not the way it used to be when you were young. Any doubt? Watch this video on the social media revolution.
Continue reading “5 Ways Parents Can Get a Grip on Social Media”
Join Facebook? For three years I avoided the site. I knew that some of my friends from work, church, and other activities were joining, and of course the kids at school were all over it, but I just did not feel like it was a fit. Way too different, I thought. My daughter, then in graduate school, used the social networking site, and she occasionally suggested I get started with Facebook (she spoke these words in bold). Still I refrained.
At some point, however, I became aware that my mother and my twenty-something daughter were communicating with each other more than usual. They knew things about each other that I did not know. Finally my daughter mentioned that her grandmother — my mother — was on Facebook and that the two of them had “friended’ one another. That’s when I called Mom, at that time age 81. She explained that her fellow workers from the Obama campaign, exceptional young people she called them, had arranged virtual reunions on Facebook. They wanted her to participate and helped her get started.
So, like many of today’s parents, I found that I was in the middle, but basically out of the generational communication loop. By the time I tuned in, my mother had over 100 friends, all people she knew in one way or another (no strangers and privacy settings in place, she reassured me), and quite a few in her age-range. I signed up for Facebook.
I am reading Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Ourselves. Turkle is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last Friday she was Ira Flatow’s guest on the NPR’s Science Friday program. Professor Turkle explained how she interviewed more than 300 children and teens who described feeling immense frustration when their parents use technology gadgets at the same time they are supposed to be interacting with their kids.
The Alone Together author, quoted in a January 31, 2011 Washington Post article, AnyBody: Parents are Ignoring their Children for their BlackBerry, points out, “It’s now children who are complaining about their parents’ habits…” During the Science Friday interview Turkle identified five times when children want their parents to put away their phones, Blackberries, and other gadgets and to pay attention. They include: Continue reading “5 Tech-Free Times for Families”
Media! Tech! Parenting! 
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