Digital Smarts Blog

Researchers at the University of Colorado have developed an app that can alert school leaders and parents to the possibility that students are being bullied online. The BullyAlert app currently only monitors Instagram accounts, but developers say they are working to add other platforms and hope it will help schools curb cyberbullying. The developers are asking parents, guardians or other “well-wishers” to sign up for this abuse monitoring system and give feedback on its performance. The app is part of the CyberSafety Research Center’s cyberbullying research initiative. Examples of apps of the same genre include Auditor, which monitors Gmail for indicators of bullying or the potential intention of self-harm; Net Nanny, which lets parents monitor and filter kids’ online behavior; and STOP!t, which is used within schools and empowers students to report bullying.

Screen time is becoming more and more of a family issue and many tech companies are attempting to help parents by providing tools such as Apple’s Screen Time, Disney’s Circle and Amazon’s Freetime. How do you make sense of all the different options out there and figure out which one will fit your needs? National Public Radio recently released a great starting point called A Guide To Parental Controls For Kids' Tech Use that asks you questions that help you zero in on the help you may be needing.

Makerspaces, also called hackerspaces, hackspaces, and fablabs, are collaborative spaces where young people gather to get creative with DIY projects, invent new ones, and share ideas. They are popping up school campuses, at local museums and libraries and in other non-traditional education spaces in support of STEM. Many offer community resources like 3D printers, software, electronics, craft and hardware supplies, and more.

Despite the exciting potential these spaces bring, a lack of focus around culture and gender inclusiveness is stunting the movement’s true promise, a new report out of Drexel University reports. Researchers found a widespread gender bias, reporting there may be a tendency in makerspaces to view male students as more tech-savvy and that male students were more than twice as likely to have leadership roles and direct projects. This possible bias is definitely something to be aware of if your child- male or female – is participating in one of these projects.

Social media use, such as scrolling through Instagram and texting, had positive findings for 9- and 10-year-olds participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, a project of the National Institutes of Health. The study, launched in 2015, gathered information about how young people's brains develop and how they navigate adolescence. The study's results showed that when comparing different types of screen time, social media use led to more physical activity, less family conflict and better sleep compared to time spent watching TV or playing video games. As the author of the study put it, “The most important thing is that not all screen media is bad, if you want to put it in a nutshell. There's a lot of pre-existing biases that if we expose kids to media, something terrible is going to happen. What we show is that's not the case."

Students who search for a college on Google will now receive extra data about the institution, including cost, majors, outcomes and admissions information. According to an article on TechCrunch, the new search feature uses data from the US Department of Education's College and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. It is available now for only four-year institutions, but it is a good way to take a first look at multiple colleges very quickly.

In a new commentary on the EdSurge site, Nikki Schafer, a technology integration specialist in a Nebraska school district, points out that outdated screen time recommendations from various medical organizations and in the media has increased parental angst to the point that parents can’t differentiate between screen time for entertainment and screen time for learning. This lack of clarification for over a decade has left many parents with anxiety about device use in general and caused a backlash to the use of technology in the schools. In turn, this has put pressure on schools and districts to carefully explain and prove why adoption of digital tools is not only beneficial, but necessary. In Schafer’s district, she explains, they work to help parents understand that not all screen time is created equal. Sometimes screens entertain, sometimes they distract and in many cases they can support a lot of the skills and characteristics teachers and parents have always known to be critical to growth and development.

Experts say that if you use your phone all the time, especially during meals, you should really disinfect it daily.  Apple and other manufacturers recommend turning off your phone before cleaning, and avoid getting liquid into the device’s charging port or other openings. Also, don’t spray disinfectant directly onto the device. Instead, spray onto a clean cloth or paper towel, or use a pre-treated disinfecting wipe. 

An annual survey of teenagers by Junior Achievement and Ernst and Young show that fewer boys want to pursue a science, technology, engineering or math career. According to the results, Boys' interest in STEM fields declined from 36% last year to 24% this year, but girls' interest in STEM fields remained unchanged at 11% of all surveyed girls.

The average global consumer will invest almost eight hours a day, or precisely 479 minutes, with media in 2018 - an increase of 12% since 2011, Zenith reports in MediaPost Communications. 24% of that time will be spent consuming media on mobile. The report also notes that while print and linear TV consumption have declined over the past several years, most also have digital content online, so they may not be the dying media outlets as they are often portrayed to be.

Marquette University has adopted a mobile app called AlertTraveler, to help keep students safe while they are traveling outside of the US. About 50 other colleges, including the University of Kansas and the University of Georgia, are already using the app, which was first released in the fall of 2017. AlertTraveler centralizes the communication and risk-awareness efforts that study-abroad offices previously conducted by phone or email. For example, study aboard administrators can use the app to automatically notify students of life-threatening or high-risk situations in their geographic location — such as an active shooter, a natural disaster or seriously political instability — through push notifications, email or text messages, all of which the app supports. The app is also available for use by general travelers as well.

Almost 79% of consumers are somewhat or very worried about information privacy on social media, and over 82% censor themselves, finds a survey by The Atlantic online. Facebook was the least-trusted social platform, despite also being the most widely used. Older people were more likely than younger people to report self-censoring because of privacy concerns, though the likelihood was 75 percent or above for all age groups. “Self-censorship” for this survey was defined as stopping yourself from posting something you might otherwise want to share, because of concerns about privacy.

Adolescents who spent more time doing screen-based activities such as gaming, social messaging, TV watching, or web surfing were more likely to develop symptoms of insomnia and sleep deprivation, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. Researchers are speculating the connection of these symptoms to depression as well. “Higher rates of depressive symptoms among teens may be partially explained through the ubiquitous use of screen-based activities, which can interfere with high quality restorative sleep,” said postdoctoral researcher Xian Stella Li, Ph.D.

Looked at your privacy setting for Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple lately? Have you read in detail those updated privacy polices from each of these sites that seems to appear daily in your inbox? No? Well, you are not alone - 95 percent of people are too busy, or too confused, to change a darn thing. But what if you had a clickable list of where to go and instructions of what to look for on each of these sites that might give you at least a fighting chance to preserve your privacy as much as possible? An article in the Washington Post by Geoffrey Fowler entitled Hands off my data! 15 default privacy settings you should change right now tells you how to look at your settings, find out what the defaults are, and change them to fit your needs. With this list you can move from site to site quickly and efficiently and make a substantial difference in your privacy exposure in just half an hour.

If your kids use Twitter, you might have heard about how the platform has been suspending the accounts of users it believes were underage when they signed up for the popular social media service. This move has caused widespread confusion and raised questions for other companies struggling to comply with new data-privacy laws. While it is not certain what has prompted this action, media reports highlight examples of account suspensions that occurred in late May when the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, came into effect. That new provision holds that tech companies processing the personal data of children must obtain explicit consent from a parent or guardian.

YouTube is the most popular social media platform among teenagers, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. Data show that 85% of teens use YouTube, compared with 72% who use Instagram and 69% who use Snapchat. Only roughly half of teens ages 13 to 17 say they use Facebook.

New mobile applications from Apple and Google allow consumers and parents to limit how long their children use apps, including Netflix and social media. The Apple’s Screen Time app, for example, can restrict access to some apps and websites. From Google, an app called Family Link allows parents to see how often kids use certain apps, approve or block app downloads, set screen time limits, and even lock devices remotely.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced several proposals recently aimed at keeping students safe in schools. Among the ideas were stricter policies for gun ownership and social media assessment programs. Abbott noted that social media often gives clues about the intentions of those who want to do fellow students harm and wants to expand a program led by Texas Tech to use telemedicine mental health screenings to identify students at risk of committing violence.

Forty-five percent of teenagers say they are online “almost constantly,” according to a new Pew Research Center study on teens and social media use. That percentage has nearly doubled in just a few years: in a 2014-2015 Pew survey, 24 percent of teens said the same. That rise in the “almost constantly” category is probably linked to “a pretty big jump” in teens who have access to smartphones, researchers say. 95% of teens have access to a smartphone in 2018, whereas three years ago, Pew reported that number was only 73%.

The results were also very interesting when it came to teens answering the question about whether social media has had a mostly positive (31%), neither positive nor negative (45%), or mostly negative (24%) effect on people their age. Adults tend to talk about the negatives of teen social media use in terms of addiction, but instead of addiction, more teens in the survey were worried about social media’s role in bullying and hurting relationships.

Perhaps you have already looked at the summary of data that Facebook has stored on you, but what about Google? The tool for downloading your data from Google is called Takeout, and has been around since 2008. Go to google.com/takeout and select the information you want to download. You can choose everything, or hone in on certain things such as your location history from Google Maps or your viewing history on YouTube. If you want some hints on what to look out for and what to delete in your Google history, take a look at Google’s File on Me Was Huge. Here’s Why It Wasn’t as Creepy as My Facebook Data.  

Sesame Workshop has launched a new “TV-ready” streaming app. The free-to-download app is available in the Vewd App Store for connected smart TV devices, and provides the ability to stream 48 seasons of Sesame Street and explore “dedicated sections” for main characters like Big Bird and Elmo. The app is part of an overall effort to expand the reach of Children’s Television Workshop leading up to their 50th anniversary next year. Other Sesame Street apps are also available on the Sesame Street site.