The power of kid-powered tablets

This article about tablets in school has something to teach us about tablets at home too. Tablets – iPads, Kindle Fires, Meeps, Nabis, iTouches (see this) – and even the apps on them aren’t the main event. They can be seen as the means to an end: creativity, communication, learning, fun (author and game designer [...]

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Holding Parents Responsible for Their Child’s Bullying

Guest post by Justin W. Patchin Without a doubt, parents have a duty to do their part to ensure that their kids do not bully others.  They need to regularly remind their kids about the importance of treating others the way they would want to be treated.  They should talk about how some things we [...]

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Pinterest for consuming, curating, producing

I love seeing the clear distinction being made by this teacher between consuming vs. producing social media – and the learning value being placed on the producing. Seems obvious, I know, but I still see peers – including media researchers – referring to today’s media as merely consumed. “As I looked into using Pinterest as [...]

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Hurting others hurts us: Study

Although the victim is usually the focus in discussions about the impacts of social cruelty, everybody involved in it feels some pain or distress, research shows. Two recent studies offer fresh insights into the impacts on bystanders, both those who witness cruel behavior and those who feel compelled to participate. First the latter, from the [...]

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Google unleashes new weapon and millions of dollars to fight child porn

Google on Saturday said that it’s building a “cross industry database” of encrypted “fingerprints” of child sexual abuse images to “enable companies, law enforcement and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing these images, and to take action against the criminals.” The database will be shared with other companies and will include references to images [...]

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The parents are alright about young children’s use of media

A survey of 2,300 parents of children between birth and eight years of age found that “Parents do not report having many family conflicts or concerns about their children’s media use with 78% disagreeing with the statement, “negotiating media use causes conflicts in our home.”  Twenty percent agree with that statement. The study also found that [...]

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Parenting the littlest media users: Important study

Increasingly, digital media are just part of the rhythm of everyday US family life, a significant new study of parents of young children indicates. The study, “Parenting in the Age of Digital Technology,” conducted by Northwestern University’s Center on Media & Human Development, surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 2,300 parents of children [...]

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Facebook Adds Twitter-Like Hashtags

Facebook announced that it is allowing users to create and click on hashtags, “similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest.” A hashtag, which is simply a word preceded by a pound or hash symbol (#) is a way to participate in a public discussion about a topic and allow others to click on or [...]

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Point & counterpoint on young video gamers: 2 studies

What an interesting point and counterpoint about videogames have been turned up by two just-released studies, one from Northwestern University in the US and one by University of Victoria in Canada: On the one hand: “Parents assess video games more negatively than television, computers, and mobile devices. More parents rate video games as having a [...]

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Undercover mom on Instagram

One of her aliases is CupcakePuppy44. That’s parent, author, and former teacher Sharon Duke Estroff’s Instagram handle. She created a join account with her 10-year-old after some stonewalling and some external investigation (with kids, fellow parents, and psychologists), not to mention a certain amount of hounding by her daughter, who – not unlike other 4th- [...]

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