Keeping track of a number of stories relating to ‘Raising Children in a Digital Age‘ in the news:
- Teach your kids to be good digital citizens: Just like teaching a kid to ride a bike, vice-principal Mark Keating said you should keep the training wheels on Internet use until your children are ready to explore on their own.
- Studying the ripple effects of kids’ digital media usage: Now, imagine that a child turning on a screen-media device is that stone plopping into the water, and the effects or outcomes of that act are the emanating waves. Here, the pattern is crazily fractured – going out at different speeds, changing directions, overlapping itself, bouncing off some unseen force.
- Supertask me: is the digital world turning kids into junkies or making them smarter?: Young people have never faced so many demands on their attention. Two thirds of UK 12- to 15-year-olds now have a smartphone, according to an Ofcom report last year — a 50 per cent rise from 2011. More and more, children’s time online is spent switching between websites and apps, with new must-haves popping up every month: you’ve heard of Snapchat but what about Keek, Viber and Phish? By the time you read this there’ll be more new arrivals.
- DIGITAL ‘SWEETIE’ SNARES 20,000 WOULD-BE CHILD PREDATORS, IDENTIFIES 1,000: Who said technology was all bad? On Monday, child-rights group Terre des Hommes announced that they’d spent nearly three months conducting a giant sting op: nearly 20,000 Web users had contacted to a digital 10-year-old named “Sweetie,” with 1,000 of them offering ‘her’ money for sex acts performed on camera.
- Parent’s use of digital photography shown as effective tool in diagnosis of retinoblastoma: Can parents use digital cameras and smart phones to potentially screen their children for the most common form of pediatric eye cancer? Baylor University and Harvard Medical School researchers believe so.
Digiexplorer (not guru), Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing @ Manchester Metropolitan University. Interested in digital literacy and digital culture in the third sector (especially faith). Author of ‘Raising Children in a Digital Age’, regularly checks hashtag #DigitalParenting.