Digital Smarts Blog

With school out for most, digital gaming often becomes the first way kids seek to stay entertained. If you are finding that your children, like so many others, are spending inordinate amounts of time playing a game called Fortnite, you might want to look at A Non-Gamer’s Guide to Fortnite, the Game That Conquered All the Screens, from The New York Times Personal Tech page. The article does a great job of explaining the game and letting parents foresee issues that they might want to discuss with their children.

Schools  in the United Kingdom are to receive new guidance on lessons in online personal safety. The lessons, focused in part on social media, are to begin as early as age 4. The authors of the new guidelines write “Today children have to learn to cope in two worlds: the virtual one and the real one – and this is giving old problems a dangerous new edge.”

The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that too much screen time may boost teens' risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, according to a study of 2,587 10th-graders in Los Angeles. Findings show that students in the study who were high frequency users of 7 or 14 digital media platforms were more than twice as likely to develop ADHD symptoms as students who didn't have a high frequency use rate of any of the online social activities.

Been having trouble typing on an iPad recently with different characters than the ones you thought you pressed showing up? Apple’s current iOS 11 update for the iPad includes a new feature in the system’s built-in software keyboard called Key Flicks — which may be inadvertently disrupting your text entry. With Key Flicks enabled, most of the onscreen keys can enter different characters depending on how your fingers touch the glass.

The alternate characters for each key are shown in gray above the larger black standard letter or punctuation marks. If you tap the T key normally, you get the letter T. However, if you tap the T key and your finger happens to linger and slide down a bit, the Key Flicks software will use the alternate character for that key — which is the number 5.

Want to turn it off and return to what it was like before? Go to the iPad’s home screen and open the Settings app. Tap General, and on the General screen tap Keyboard. In the list of settings, find Enable Key Flicks and tap the button to the right of it to disable the feature and go back to using the multiple keyboard levels to insert numbers and other characters.

“Cyberattacks against the US are on the rise and have reached a critical point,” said Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats recently. Coats identified China, Iran, North Korea and Russia as the biggest threats, saying that they target federal agencies, state and local governments, businesses and even schools every day.

Are you interested in finding some good educational apps for your children?  The National Public Radio site recently offered an article titled iTeach: A Guide To The Most Useful Apps for Classroom that offers an array of highly reviewed apps for classroom and learning use. The list includes a variety of tools for the classroom, such as Kahoot! a quiz game creator app, and Seesaw, a digital journal creator, and highlights what experts think are the best apps for using at home, for home-school communication, or to suggest at your school.

Nonprofit Khan Academy has launched an educational app designed for early learners (ages 2-5) called Khan Academy Kids. The full app is available free for iOS and is in beta for Android, and includes thousands of original activities, books, videos and lessons, and combines subjects like math and reading with creative activities like drawing and storytelling.

A study profiled in the T.H.E. Journal shows the majority of kindergarten through twelfth grade students are using technology to complete assignments, with only 42% primarily using pencil and paper. The data also show that 66% of teachers say technology increases student productivity and 60% say it's intellectually stimulating for students.

A national network of "fusion centers" -- secret facilities that gather information to help support public safety -- are working to help stop school shootings before they occur. While this may sound like a big advancement for school safety, EdSurge reports that the work that includes culling social media and data to identify threats and predict where school shootings may happen has actually created debate among privacy experts and advocates. They worry that there is a risk of misidentifying students as threats. Experts note slang words that are not threat related often appear in texts such as ‘I killed that test’ or ‘these shoes are the bomb’. Calls to open more of these monitoring centers are increasing as the number of school shootings rises.

Snapchat is ramping up its partnership with Fanbytes, a London-based startup that works with teen creators. Four Fanbytes’ channels on the platform will now be featured on Discover. The channels already attract daily views of between 1.7 million and 8 million, according to CEO Timothy Armoo. In an article on Digiday, Armoo explains their appeal, saying "it's all driven by 15-, 16-year-olds who understand this audience way better than the 35-year-olds at the other corporations who don't understand the DNA of how young people engage with content."

Looking at teens' social networks may reveal how their brains work, says University of Pennsylvania neuroscience researchers. In a commentary on the Scientific American blog, Emily Falk, director of the Penn Communication Neuroscience Lab, and Michael Platt, director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, note that by better understanding how teens make connections they can learn more about how to engage teens. For example, teens who are “information brokers,” having a knack for connecting people who wouldn’t otherwise know each other, come up with better solutions to problems, potentially because they are exposed to more diverse perspectives.

According to KPIX-TV (San Francisco), Mattel has teamed with Oakland, Calif., nonprofit Black Girls Code to develop a new black Barbie that builds robots and may inspire girls and minorities to pursue careers in science. "Black Girls Code is breaking barriers, pushing down walls and really empowering our girls to let them know they can be here," says the nonprofit's Amber Morse.

AppAnnie reports in USA Today that Facebook is most downloaded app in the nearly 10-year history of Apple's App Store. Facebook Messenger, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp round out the top five. Check out others that made the list here.

According to EdTechOnline, Michael Hawes, director of the Student Privacy Policy and Assistance Division at the U.S. Department of Education, says that for schools, when it comes to student information and adhering to federal privacy law, the key is transparency with parents. Parents often complain because they see the risks of their child’s information being used, but not the benefits. If you don’t know how your children’s personally identifiable information is being stored and used, make sure to ask when school starts again in the fall.

What is the average age for kids to open a social media account? The last study done on the subject was back in 2016 and the average age was twelve and a half. Summer is a big time for kids to ask to open their own accounts to keep in touch with friends while school is out, so parents of kids around this age should be prepared. Psychologists say that around 12 years old is when kids have the capability to follow your rules and to understand that those rules are set in place for their safety. Sit down and talk about how to keep personal information – age, where they go to school, address, phone numbers, credit card numbers and more – private, and explore together the platform your child is interested in, including the privacy settings that can be used.

If you have a toddler who likes to get hold of your iPhone you know how easy it could be to get locked out and have your phone disabled. So what can you do? Turns out that even if you can’t remember the passcode, these are ways to get around it using iTunes and the back up data you have stored on your computer. If you haven’t backed up your phone, this is even more of a reason to do so!

Forty-four percent of cybersecurity pros say they are reducing the amount of time they spend on Facebook after the company's recent security controversies, a Black Hat survey has found. Seven percent of respondents say they are going to delete their accounts because of the incidents. Something else interesting to note: only one quarter think that “in the future it will be possible for individuals to protect their online identity and privacy,” while more than 50% explicitly disagree with that supposition.

Bookmark this link for the next time your kids need to do a school project that involves a presentation or creation of a video and could be enhanced by clips from an old movie or even some rather quirky industrial and public service films from the “good old days”. The article entitled Find Free (Old) Feature Films Online shares how to find thousands of films that have either lost their copyright or have been released into the public domain.

Have you ever thought about how dirty your laptop can be? A most practical article in The New York Times Tech Section entitled How to Clean Your Filthy, Disgusting Laptop starts out with helping you figure what supplies you need all the way to getting rid of stinky smells that sometimes attach themselves to a keyboard.

YouTube's monthly user base has increased to 1.9 billion, up from 1.5 billion at the same time in 2017, Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan announced in USA Today. "We have creators with viewership that's higher than many cable channels," he said, adding that the platform has been working on brand safety issues especially since some renegade producers have been posting videos that many find in bad taste or even illegal.