Media! Tech! Parenting!

digital citizenship, digital parenting, parents and technology, privacy, social media

Do Your Kids Take Online Surveys and Quizzes?

Posted on April 18, 2011March 20, 2019 by Marti Weston

qoogle search quizzes — A Quick Google Search for Quizzes

For sometime now I’ve considered writing a post on the problems with web surveys and quizzes. These tricky techniques use old-fashioned fun, emulating the magazine quiz features of the past and encouraging web users to happily divulge all sorts of personal information. Each of these activities is a small privacy invader using a “have fun and learn more” guise.

Instead of writing more on this subject here on MediaTech Parenting, I suggest your head over to visit the I Look Both Ways blog, where Linda Criddle has posted Online Quizzes and Surveys and the Real Risks These Represent. Linda’s post offers a comprehensive overview of the subject along with supplemental images.

Continue reading “Do Your Kids Take Online Surveys and Quizzes?” →

digital parenting, healthy media images, media literacy, parents and technology, technology support

Location, Location, Location (Services, that is…)

Posted on April 16, 2011March 20, 2019 by Marti Weston

A tech-savvy middle school parent sent me the link to the video at the end of this post. She added a comment: “This is scary. Should I let it upset me?” As of mid-April 2011, according to YouTube, the video has been viewed nearly 2.8 million times

There is nothing quite like the queasy feeling a parent gets when a media outlet airs a story with shrill content that aims to frighten and questions the safety of their children. In this case, the report included a solution at the end of the news segment, but by then many viewers were probably too upset to focus. YouTube makes it all so easy, and we can view the segment again and again and then pass it on to others. If each of us had more media literacy skill, we’d hit the stop button, move on to something else, and not even think about forwarding it to our friends.

Specifically, this video addresses two concepts: geotagging and location services on smartphones. Setting aside the anxiety about the information revealed by digital pictures, the video highlights a critical digital-age dilemma for parents: how to develop basic knowledge about the digital devices that they purchase for their children. Location service happens to be the current concern, but by the time the next round of must-have gadgets arrives on the scene, another issue will emerge. Knowledge is power.

Continue reading “Location, Location, Location (Services, that is…)” →

data collecting, data sharing, digital parenting, media literacy, parents and technology, social media, social networking, teens and technology

Quiz: How Much do You Know About Social Media?

Posted on April 12, 2011March 20, 2019 by Marti Weston

To get a sense of how much you really know about the social networking world and the movers and shakers who are actively developing and tweaking it, take a social media quiz. The Big Social Media Quiz over at the Liberate Media website.

A user needs 70% to pass this quiz, and though I know all sorts of minutia about social media, I only answered 50% of the questions correctly. Sigh!

Liberate Media is a PR firm with social media expertise.

acceptable use, Back-to-school digital reading, copyright, digital devices and gadgets, Evaluating Web Resources

3 Copyright Resources: Teaching Digital Kids to Respect Ownership

Posted on April 9, 2011February 27, 2015 by Marti Weston

copyright society — Visit Copyright for Kids!

The other day I chatted with a parent about the concept of copyright. Both of us are concerned that digital kids understand very little about intellectual property. The free-for-all digital information climate ensures that children have considerable difficulty comprehending what belongs to whom.

Copyright laws are arcane, and even a bit crazy, but it’s critical to teach kids that protecting the intellectual property of others is important. With your child take the Copyright Challenge quiz at Copyright for Kids to see how much you know. When you finish the quiz check out these frequently asked questions about copyright.

Two Other Resources

The Copyright for Kids at the Copyright Society
The Library of Congress: Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright

Bookmark It!, digital parenting, homework, parents and technology

Presentations Without the Power Point Hassle — Bookmark It!

Posted on April 6, 2011April 6, 2011 by Marti Weston

Just about every parent knows the experience. A child prepares a great PowerPoint presentation, takes it to school, and then it doesn’t work — for some reason. Maybe it was huge with way too many graphics and did not transfer correctly to a CD or flash drive. Or perhaps your kid made a presentation on a Mac, but glitches occur when the presentation is on a PC?

Solve this problem and explore several ways to refine the whole process — writing, developing, and presenting — on a quality website, and live life without the file transfer hassles. At any number of Web 2.0 presentation sites a user, signs in, creates, works steadily on a project, saves, and can access it again to continue working or presenting as long as a computer is connected to the web.

Discovery Education features a page with four of these presentation tools, including one that allows a user to upload a Powerpoint file to the web and then present it. Discovery provides thumbnail descriptions of Prezi, SlideShare, Picsviewr, and 280Slides along with links to each of the websites. Continue reading “Presentations Without the Power Point Hassle — Bookmark It!” →

acceptable use, digital citizenship, digital parenting, leaving comments online, online education, parents and technology

If Every Family Had a Blog…

Posted on April 4, 2011March 20, 2019 by Marti Weston

How would digital literacy and behavior improve if more families saw blogging as a way to communicate, connect with extended family members, and teach their children the basics about global communication? Would they be thrilled that their children had a big head start developing digital citizenship skills? Would they be delighted at all of the writing taking place and take pride as they watched children develop stronger writing skills?

Blogging is safe and easily managed. While we’ve all heard the scary stories, such as people going online and writing mean comments or nasty rumors that go public or even viral — in truth just about all blogging is safe and fun. Blogging teaches people to write, revise, write more, and publish for a community of readers.

Imagine, for a moment, if a family with two children, age five and seven, along with a bunch of relatives, starts a blog.

Family members, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins write, post, and comment. Parents are editors and managers, at least at the beginning, modeling and demonstrating how to use technology (social media) appropriately. Gradually family members share responsibilities.
Continue reading “If Every Family Had a Blog…” →

American Academy of Pediatricians, cyber-bullying, digital citizenship, digital parenting, parents and technology, supervising kids, teens and technology

Pediatricians, Parents, and Digital Kids, Part II

Posted on April 2, 2011March 19, 2019 by Marti Weston

Last Monday I read three powerful articles, and they fit together like a puzzle. They illustrate how a generational digital divide accentuates adolescent virtual world problems — a result of the contradictory digital perceptions of teens and adults.

POISONED WEB: A Girl’s Nude Photo and Altered Lives, appeared in the New York Times. The article describes how small, teenage misjudgments in the unsupervised world of instant web, smartphones, and cyber-bullying, can magnify hate and cause terrible pain. Reporter Jan Hoffman quotes adults who wish they had supervised more carefully and pledge to do more in the future. I wondered, as I often do when I read these articles, what leads adults not to supervise in the first place? Reading about the teachers, administrators, and officials who attempted to create opportunities for growth and learning out of the senseless hurt and cruelty was a highlight of the article.