Category: family conversations

Posted in cyber-bullying, digital citizenship, digital parenting, family conversations, parents and technology, setting technology limits

Keeping Track? Adolescents in the Digital Age

Posted on by Marti Weston

I’ve been keeping Dr. Gwen Schurgin-Okeeffe’s (AKA Dr. Gwenn) book close by for several months now. Cybersafe: Protecting and Empowering Kids in the Digital World of Texting, Gaming, and Social Media is chock-full of helpful information and advice, juxtaposing the need to empower as well as protect today’s children in the always-expanding virtual world where they live. I’ve read the entire book, and I highly recommend CyberSafe to a people who are planning school book fairs and searching for a book that addresses technology and parenting. For parents who are seeking a broad overview of digital age parenting, CyberSafe, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, is the current best bet.

This week Dr. Schurgin’s book is juxtaposed in my mind with the December 5, 2010 New York Times article, As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catch-Up. The piece, by reporter Jan Hoffman, focuses on what parents are doing – and not doing – to make the digital world, and especially potential cyber-bullying, less treacherous for their children. My technology colleague, Bruce, sent me what he felt were the most important thoughts in the New York Times article. I’ve posted these quotes below. Continue reading “Keeping Track? Adolescents in the Digital Age” →

Posted in acceptable use, digital citizenship, digital parenting, family conversations, parents and technology

Intention vs. Consequence: What Kids Don’t Understand

Posted on by Marti Weston

In the world of digital parenting, three words help adults understand how a child’s digital activities get out of hand. Using these words — magnification, intention, and consequence — in parent-child conversations can, over time, help everyone understand more about why digital problems occur.  

  • Magnification – If digital media is involved, mistakes, even those made by well-behaved and thoughtful kids, loom large and quickly become public. The magnification of a seemingly small problem often leads to embarrassment or even humiliation for everyone involved. In the digital world, private mistakes can evolve into magnified public ones.

 

  • Intention – While the world of pre-adolescents and adolescents can be rough and tumble on any day, unintended reactions to their digital activities often surprise kids. Most often a problem involves one student communicating with another, and if the initiator had only taken even moment to think over an impulsive action, the incident might not have occurred.

 

  • Consequence – If a digital problem becomes too public, too magnified, and too hurtful, consequences matter much more than anything a child intended to happen. From a young age, we teach children to say they are sorry when something goes wrong, but in the digital world, the degree of hurt and humiliation may mean that an apology is only the beginning of the recovery process.

Most adults remember a time when behavioral mistakes were more private. Rarely were our errors, even the big ones, known by more than a few people. The mechanisms for passing information from place to place, for broadcasting a problem to the world, were minimal. Times have changed.

This video below — Stop Think Connect — is a helpful resource for families with children in grades 4 – 7.

 
Posted in acceptable use, digital parenting, family conversations, media literacy, parents and technology

Terms of Use — How Much Can You Read?

Posted on by Marti Weston

I often write about parent-child conversations. We parents initiate these chats all the time, concentrating on this issue or that, and encouraging our children to participate, respond, or even disagree. When the talks focus on digital issues they can be enjoyable or arduous, or anything in-between. The fun but still educational conversations, however, only come along from time-to-time.

So the other day, when I read a posting by Linda Criddle over at the I look Both Ways blog, I became excited because kids will love the discussion on this topic — whether at home or school — and they will learn a lot in the process.

Criddle described her experience examining terms of use documents posted on well-known and popular websites. She looked over the terms of use documents for the sites such as the New York Times, Amazon, iPhone, Club Penguin. Then she ran each document through a readability index — a tool that examines a passage and estimates how easy or hard it will be for a person to read the words, as well as what level of education the reader might need to comprehend the information.

Continue reading “Terms of Use — How Much Can You Read?” →