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.
This set of summer digital activities, 5 Things You Can Do Online With Your Child This Summer, arrived in my e-mail a week or so ago. The list includes simple, but open-ended activities, each one enjoyable by itself, but with the potential to lead parents and children in many additional and enjoyable digital directions during the summer vacation. The ideas come from NetSmartz.
NetSmartz is an interactive and educational program for parents and kids, connected with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC). NetSmartz uses its considerable resources and clout to educate, engage, and empower children and their families about digital care and safety.
NetSmartz also features a wide range of digital safety educational resources for educators and law enforcement professionals.
No blog, though, at least not one that I can find. Puzzling since they provide some excellent information on blogging. Why not an example of what good blogging looks like — maybe one for parents and one for adolescents?
Have fun reading this Chicago Tribune article, Welcome to Camp Tur-Ni-Toff, describing the lengths that sleep-away camps are going to preserve “their bucolic bubbles.” It sounds like the luckiest camps are those that do not have cell reception in the area. NOTE: The reporter points out that parents have more difficulty with the gadget prohibitions than do the campers.
My favorite quote:
The essence of camp is to rise and fall on your own … not to call your parents because you’re homesick or having a bad day,
My second favorite quote:
Even letters home are done with actual stamps and paper … a first for many of our campers.
Strange screen names seem to pop up in the summer more than any other time of the year.
The best screen names are boring. In a virtual world, where even a nuanced word association can invite unfortunate behavior, taking care when choosing these online names is critical. The easiest solution is to use a first name, nickname, or a different name, perhaps paired with numbers at the beginning or end. Many years ago I used 29Marti1607, a name that attracted little attention except once when someone asked me if my ancestors had lived in colonial Jamestown (settled in 1607).
Children experiment with edgy screen names as one way to look and feel cool, and as they get older, their choices often push limits, unintentionally drawing attention. A suggestive name in any number of categories can encourage the people who interact with your child — even people who are friends — to behave impulsively in the web world where adult supervision is minimal. It is way too easy for two-way communication to go awry.
School’s out and many children fill at least part of their summer days with World Wide Web activities on fast internet connections. Camps and day camps feature computer labs and lots of specialized digital programs. On the go, we increasingly carry more gadgets — mobile phones, smartphones, iTouches, Blackberries, and iPads. In fact, even on vacations and at hotels, cottages, and many of those rustic country cabins we all hope to escape to, we stay connected. After years of teaching, I’ve found that my students’ digital skills usually expand during the three-month summer hiatus from school.
Facebook has tossed out another challenge to family members, including grandparents, who seek to maintain privacy while still enjoying the social interaction that the social network offers.
Here we go again with facial recognition.
Find instructions for disabling the new Facebook facial feature at the BBC blog, WebWise: A Beginner’s Guide to Using the Internet. I’ve compiled the basic steps after reading a number of posts about the new facial recognition addition, but read the whole BBC post for the simplest and most comprehensive explanation.
Go to Account.
Go to Privacy Settings.
Click on Customize Settings (itty-bitty blue link at the bottom).
Find the category, Things Others Share.
Find the words Suggest photos of me to friends and click the edit settings button.
Naturally…Facebook’s default has enabled the feature so you want to click on the button that disables the feature.
Another public figure has made yet another public digital gaffe, giving parents one more opportunity to engage the family in a discussion about the unrelenting power of digital tools.
Representative Weiner (D-NY) is just the latest, and it looks like public figures and celebrities will continue to make these public mistakes, like clockwork, for a long time to come. We can laugh at the ineptness of these public personalities, but the bottom line is that we are all one instant gratification click away from making a public and embarrassing error.
Although we may worry about the safety of our children and their activities on the web, most of these problems, while alarmingly publicized and widely and repetitively covered in the media, are not the biggest risk for children.
What we should dread, however, is the potential harm from a digital misjudgment spontaneously sent off via e-mail, text, Twitter, voicemail, or whatever else we all find to use in the future. Instant digital missives, unlike the gossipy handwritten notes we adults used to pass around to a few people at school, can instantly become public and humiliating. Or they can lie quietly, waiting in the vastness of the web, until some reason arises for people to seek out information about us.
Dear Blog Readers,
Media! Tech! Parenting! 
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