digital parenting – Page 34 – Media! Tech! Parenting!

digital parenting, digital world reading habits, image evaluation, media literacy, parents and technology

Picture Books Help Digital Children Understand Images

Posted on December 14, 2010December 4, 2016 by Marti Weston

Many years ago my early elementary school aged daughter met author Daniel Pinkwater in a bookstore. After listening to him read and getting his autograph, she offered him a suggestion about a picture in one of his books. My husband and I were shocked at first, but then we congratulated ourselves — our daughter was so experienced and comfortable with picture books that she felt right at home giving a suggestion to a noted author.

Visit Eric Carle’s Museum of Picture Book Art

Ensuring that picture books — lots of them — play a significant role in a child’s life is a required task for digital world parents, because all children in the connected need the skills to evaluate the images — especially the digital pictures — that saturate their lives. The Google Answers site points out that an average American is exposed to huge numbers of commercial messages each day (note the wide range of estimates at this site). Unfortunately children probably encounter these messages as well, so they need sound media literacy skills that help them interpret what they see. Picture books help.

“There’s more to these books than meets the eye,” writes Appalachian State University Professor David Considine in a document, MEDIA MATTERS: Here’s How One College Professor Puts the ‘Me’ in Media. Dr. Considine describes how he wants to demonstrate that students can “…develop critical-viewing skills by using something they already work with – picture books…” The process of reading picture books contributes mightily to the development of sound media literacy skills, building strong foundations that help children become astute image consumers.

Several recent articles have addressed picture books and young readers.

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

Intention vs. Consequence: What Kids Don’t Understand

Posted on November 25, 2010May 17, 2019 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.

digital citizenship, digital parenting, homework time, parents and technology, teens and technology

Is Digital Ubiquity Creating a Bigger Digital Divide?

Posted on November 22, 2010November 22, 2010 by Marti Weston

Yesterday (November 21, 2010) a New York Times article, Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction, described the increasing problems that adolescents experience when choosing between computer entertainment and school assignments. Moreover, a fair number of students find it more and more difficulty complete reading assignments because they prefer short-lived digital activities. One compelling point in reporter Matt Richtel’s article stands out and makes me wonder — is the digital divide expanding before our eyes, even in families that can afford basic computer equipment and access?

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Back-to-school digital reading, digital parenting, digital world reading habits, homework, parents and technology, research on the web, web research

Digital Reading: How Much Does Your Child Trust Search Links?

Posted on October 31, 2010October 31, 2010 by Marti Weston

If you enjoy this post, check out my August 2010 post about using online databases, Staying Ahead With Online Resources, about online data.

The next time you watch your child begin a web search for a school project or other academic activity, take a few minutes to observe more closely how he or she selects web resources. In Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content (this abstract site leads to a free PDF of the article), professor Eszter Hargittai and colleagues form the Web Use Project at Northwestern University, describe how students tend to place huge amounts of trust in the initial hits retrieved by search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

With first year students in a required writing course at the University of Illinois Chicago (chosen because of its highly diverse student body) researchers conducted a written survey of 1060 students enrolled in the classes. Next researchers selected a stratified random sample of 192 students to observe in person as each student performed 12 specific web-based tasks. Learn more about a stratified random sample.

Interesting Observations

To complete a web-based task, students usually went to a search engine.
After search engines presented links, students tended to follow the first few links, apparently assuming that the first links in a search were reliable resources to pursue.
When they looked at a list of provided links, some had difficulty knowing the difference between regular links and sponsored links.
As they followed these links, students did not appear concerned about who authored the sites that they found (only 10 percent of the students commented about a site’s authors or the credentials presented).
To complete tasks students relied on brand names, and corporate brands dominated.
SparkNotes, an online version of Cliff Notes, dominated.
For credible sources many students favored .gov and .edu sites as more credible sites.
Many expressed trust in .org, because they are all not-for-profit sites, although these days just about anyone can get a .org web address.
To verify information, less than half of the observed students consulted a second website.

digital parenting, online safety, online security, parents and technology, privacy

Follow the Privacy Lives Blog

Posted on October 27, 2010October 27, 2010 by Marti Weston

If you are as concerned about loss of privacy as I am, I encourage you to follow the Privacy Lives blog. Publisher Melissa Ngo reviews articles, government issues, children, the Constitution, and much more. Here’s a bit of what she has posted about the blog’s mission on her About page.

In 1755, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Centuries later, we face numerous attacks on our privacy and civil rights, ostensibly for national security. Phone calls are tapped, e-mails are read, and individuals are tracked by video surveillance. We’re told that if you’re not for these invasive surveillance tactics, then you’re with the terrorists. Privacy Lives rejects such fear mongering. This site will chronicle and analyze these attacks and various defenses against them to show that privacy lives on, despite this onslaught.

Some Interesting Links to Get You Started (but don’t stop with these)

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digital parenting, online databases, parents and technology, research on the web

Do You Know What Makes a Good Website? Does Your Child Know?

Posted on October 19, 2010March 1, 2015 by Marti Weston

If the information in this post is helpful, you may also want to read my post Staying Ahead With Digital Research.

How can one determine whether or not a website is reliable?

Obviously if the website is part of library resources, students and parents can usually be assured of its quality. However, when a child sits down at a personal home computer, makes a general search on a topic for a school assignment, and begins clicking through results, understanding the characteristics that make a website reliable is critical.

Questions to Help Parents and Children Determine if a Website is Reliable …

Is the site visually interesting with an organized layout?
Does it balance writing with helpful illustrations?
Is the writer qualified to be writing on the subject? How do you know?
Can you identify facts and information about your topic that you already know are accurate
Are the fonts simple, easy to read, and uncluttered?
Is the site updated on a regular basis? How do you know?
Are there irritating pop-ups and/or other distractions. (However be aware that newspapers do have these pop-up windows.)

Kids, Hate Groups, and the Internet: There’s So Much to Encounter!

Posted on October 15, 2010September 21, 2019 by Marti Weston

In today’s digital world groups increasingly troll the Internet, depositing easily available and intriguing materials — music, posters, jokes, cartoons, and stories — whose sole purpose is to introduce growing children to hate. Over recent years this readily available propaganda, designed expressly to appeal to teen sarcasm, edgy humor, and musical preferences, strives to look like any other funny or absurd digital content a student might casually discover. Except that it’s not funny.

It’s also not something for parents to scare. The simple fix is for parents and educators to talk with children, mentoring them, helping them learn to evaluate, guiding them to develop an eagle eye that identifies and filters hateful content — exactly what you teach them to do with any other inappropriate content.

All of us — educators, parents, and especially adolescents — need to know how to recognize this type of information and how to alert others. Hate groups look for vulnerable pre-adolescents and teens from every socioeconomic group. The level of education in a child’s home and an emphasis on values of respect and acceptance may not make a difference if a child, during an especially needy, lonely, or stressful time or through an error in judgment, encounters a clever hate group tactic. Many children are simply attracted by absurdity, laughing at symbols they know little about. That’s also when a group may try, if it has even a bit of personal information, to encourage an adolescent to come back, laugh some more, and maybe even make a friend.

Hate groups have become more active and more visible since President Obama’s 2008 election, but these organizations, some quite small, have courted young people for years. An old, but still relevant Salon Magazine article, Web of Hate, described the problem as it existed on the Internet in 1998, providing a good background. The issue, however, is far more serious today.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) spends a considerable amount of its time and money tracking purveyors of hate. Its website features an interactive hate map and also provides first-rate resources that parents, teachers, and religious leaders can use when hateful content surfaces or when it’s necessary to actually fight recruitment tactics. The map, by the way, is an extraordinary teaching tool in itself, but so are the SPLC intelligence files such as this one on the Ku Klux Klan.

Read about the white power racist music industry and some of its recruitment strategies. In an article in the California-based, East Country Magazine, James McElroy, a chairman of the SPLC board comments:

We try to shine a little light on it. Hate is like a fungus under a rock. Shine a light and you can eradicate it.

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