Category: parents and technology

Posted in digital parenting, hearing loss, iPhones and iPads, parents and technology, technology and health problems

App Demonstrates How Hearing Can Be Impaired

Posted on by Marti Weston
Check out your hearing!

It’s a fact of life. We all spend lots of time attached to headphones.

Most of us know enough to take care with the volume, but are we really doing it? Moreover, what can we do to ensure that our kids are regulating the volume as they listen to music?  It doesn’t help that many pre-teens and adolescents don’t always listen to their parents.

Now a new app, Auto-Old My Music, may be able to communicate the dangers of extremely loud music better than we can. This app, available for iPhone and iPod, plays the music differently — it’s muffled and not particularly clear — just the way it might sound to a person who is hearing impaired.

Now that might successfully drive the point home.

The Auto-Old My Music app, designed by the Baptist Memorial Health Care in Memphis, Tennessee, is a response to research, Change in Prevalence of Hearing Loss in U.S. Adolescents, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Read the full article in PDF format.

Articles to Check Out

You can also read my 2010 post, Teens and Hearing Loss.

Posted in cell phones, digital parenting, parents and technology

Want Sleep in Your Home? Get Charging Stations

Posted on by Marti Weston
Charging stations at Pottery Barn.

To make a positive difference in the quality of  your household’s sleep, consider purchasing one or two charging stations where family members’ phones and other devices can be charged at your house. Install charging stations away from the bedrooms of family members. A Google search for charging stations gets you started, or you can begin with this Mashable post, 10 Chic Charging Stations.

I recently discovered, in a small way, just how a cell phone screen can affect sleep. I received a new Solitaire game app, and I started playing two or three games on my iPhone just before bed several nights in a row. A few games grew into  20 or 30 minutes of play, but when I put down the phone, it took me a long time to settle down. The fourth night I did not play, and sleep came easily. Lesson learned.

I’ve added four pictures of charging stations that my family has checked out — some practical and others with a bit of whimsy. Many others are available. Continue reading “Want Sleep in Your Home? Get Charging Stations” →

Posted in parents and technology

Happy New Year from MediaTechParenting!

Posted on by Marti Weston

Welcome 2012!

I’ve taken ten days off from blogging to enjoy friends, my senior parents, my daughter, her husband, and their little dog. To the left of this post, and down a bit, you can see a cute picture of him sitting at their Mac as if he is preparing to search the web or maybe write a blog post.

The holidays included lots of time for relaxing, some early winter yard cleaning, and plenty of New Year’s organizing around the house.

Stay tuned. In 2012 I’ll have plenty to share on MediaTechParenting — books I am reading, research I’ve discovered, cool gadgets I’ve received, and articles on technology.

We can be sure that 2012 will bring increased innovation, more technological gadgets, expanded social media, and lots of opportunities to experiment and collaborate with digital resources. Our children and students, we can be certain, will competently and confidently embrace just about everything that comes down the pike.

We adults will need to embrace change, learn as much as we can, model appropriate behavior for the children in our families and classes, and remind ourselves of the importance of  lifelong collaborative learning.

Posted in answers to media questions, digital parenting, media literacy, parents and technology, social media, social networking

You Can be Media Savvy with Your Kids in 2012!

Posted on by Marti Weston

Common Sense Media recently posted Six Ways to be a Media Savvy Parent in 2012. The December 2011 report suggests all sorts of ideas that can help parents (and other adults) develop stronger media (and media literacy) skills.

Suggestions include downloading a game to play with the kids, trying out a social media site, investigating YouTube, and much more. Some these can ideas will provide great fun for kids and parents over the holiday vacation.

Visit Common Sense Media and try out some of these features.

Thanks to my colleague and friend Renee Hawkins for spotting a good media post (one that I had missed). Renee blogs with another friend and colleague, Susan Davis, at The Flying Trapeze.

Posted in cultural changes, digital learning, digital parenting, online learning, parents and technology, privatization

Good Ed for Kids? Then Don’t Expect Online to Replace Teachers!

Posted on by Marti Weston
One of my students summed it up perfectly with this poster.

Check out the article, Why Online Learning Should Not Mean Replacing Teachers With Computers, at the MacArthur Foundation website. The post describes an article in the Nation Magazine that examines how online learning companies are manipulating the futures of our children.

I am peripherally involved with a new middle school Khan Academy project. As I’ve watched the program get started and observed the teacher combining her experienced teaching skills with the online opportunities that Khan presents, I am impressed. This dynamic classroom environment combines the best of face-to-face interaction with online learning tools, but the teacher-student connection continues, just as it always has. It’s a joy to watch children work in this setting.

What makes my colleague’s classroom so amazing is how she blends learning resources together — the activities that have always been in her classroom are now expanded with the online Khan materials. And with these additional digital materials she can more easily analyze the needs of her students, reinforce skills, and expand assignments. It’s this blend of rich teaching together with a unique online educational resource, that creates a strong educational environment in her classroom
How sad it will be if some children only have an opportunity to learn online, because the human interaction — and by this I mean the face-to-face moment-by-moment connections and not the digital communications between teacher and student — will never be completely replaced. As one of my colleagues commented recently, blended instruction (a combination of online and connections to real people) will always the easiest way to learn.

We are all living in a time of transformative cultural change. These days teaching — and learning for that matter — seem to be under fire everywhere we look — even in districts with the highest achievement levels in their states. Good digital resources present us with lots of opportunity and the potential to expand and improve the traditional classroom in infinite and exciting directions. Run-of-the-mill digital resources do very little and may, in fact, create more problems.

The bottom line?   Continue reading “Good Ed for Kids? Then Don’t Expect Online to Replace Teachers!” →

Posted in digital parenting, family conversations, media literacy, parents and technology, social media, social networking, teens and technology

Pew Report on Teen Behavior and Social Media Sites

Posted on by Marti Weston
Pew infographic. Click and view larger version of this image.

Take a few minutes to read at least the main points of the November 2011 report on teens and social networking, published in November 2011 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The executive summary is a fairly quick read.

During the spring and summer of 2011 researchers made calls to 799 teens between the ages of 12 and 17, and they also spoke with a parent or guardian of each adolescent. Interestingly, a large number of the teens surveyed reported that their parents and teachers provided them with the best and most helpful advice on digital citizenship issues and other virtual concerns. The media were the third most significant influence.

Browse all of the infographics from this Pew Internet report.

A Few Other Interesting Points

Continue reading “Pew Report on Teen Behavior and Social Media Sites” →