Digital Smarts Blog

Are we truly addicted to technology? No matter what side of the debate you (and your kids) come out on, you have to admit that something is going on because no matter where you are, and what you are doing, you see people staring at their phones or other digital devices. Many people are seriously studying the tech addiction issue and say that we aren’t quite ready to admit that the addiction is real. They believe, instead, we need to be focusing on finding solutions rather than defining the addiction.

One of their ideas is to think of our attraction to technology as a habit rather than an addiction. Habits certainly are easier to change then addictions.  An example is labeling a teen, who is in the process of forming their own identity, as an addict can create a long term outlook, issues and excuses that are hard to overcome. Perhaps the question instead should be about “how can people, especially young people, forge healthier relationships with technology while continuing to use it every day?” Obviously you don’t need a formal diagnosis to work on putting your device down more often, or to encourage your kids to do so as well.

Kids are often given the option of creating a video in lieu of some kind of written assignment like an essay. However, even with a rubric to guide them on what should (or shouldn’t) be in the video, it can be hard to know what a really good video essay should include as well as look and sound like.  Fortunately, there are some great examples on YouTube. Here is a list of channels and videos. Check out how these video essays use narration, juxtaposing video footage, images, audio, and text to make the same kind of arguments that a writer would do in a traditional essay.

For less than the price of a Netflix monthly subscription, you can get access to Epic!, a digital library for children 12 and younger. They offer 25,000 premium books (some including audio), educational videos and quizzes. Epic! is a great place to let kids look for books based on their needs and interests. Better yet, Epic! is free to elementary school teachers and librarians and you can try for a month for free.

Does your toddler already have a credit issue? With so many credit bureaus using nothing but social security numbers as the way to verify a person’s identity, they could. Now many young people are finding out the hard way that they have a credit problem, because often someone in their own family used their identity to open credit card and other accounts. This form of identity theft is often not malicious. Sometimes, it’s being done in a pinch by desperate parents who are trying to make an emergency repair or get the lights turned back on. Estranged family members and hackers have also been known to use this means to gain access to credit in another person’s name.

As your young family acquires more digital devices, it is always important to review how the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) can help you keep the information of your kids 13 years old and under safe, especially what you can do if a site or service seems to be breaking the rules. In a nutshell, remember that websites and apps that target kids must have a privacy policy that should be easy to find and understand. If you can’t find it or it’s not clear to you what the app or website will do with your kid’s info, don’t let your child use it. The operator of the site or app may be violating COPPA. Also, if a website or app that targets children wants to collect your kid’s personal information, they need to get your express approval. If you think that a website or app has collected information from your child without authorization, report it to the FTC.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) recently released the results of a survey it conducted of nearly 200 attendees who work in the tech sector at the 2018 International Computer Electronics Show earlier this month. The ASHA survey results show 88% of those that think it is important, that more prominent industry figures speak out about tech overuse. The survey also showed that respondents appear to be strict about their own and their children’s tech use. Almost 67% said children should not be allowed to have their own personal tech devices until age 10 or older—this amid a societal environment where new tablets, smartwatches, and other devices are being heavily promoted for even the youngest children. Almost a third (30%) said children shouldn’t even use devices until age 10 or older.

ASHA has previously been a watchdog on the tech industry and has published numerous works on how parents need to be mindful of hearing loss in children who are listening to devices at too-loud volumes, particularly with earbuds or headphones. The organization has also been very vocal about concerns that technology may be interfering with speech and language development in young children, especially when parents use the devices as a substitute for verbal interactions, such as reading and talking, with adults.

So the experts have been saying for years that it would be better if we all put our phones away long before bedtime, but now researchers have found some data that may prove that true. The findings in Acta Paediatrica involved a study of 5,242 Canadian youths ages 11 to 20 and showed that those who used social media apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat and Facebook for just one hour a day had their sleep affected. 63.6% of those in the study who said they used social media for an hour or less every day received less than the 10 to 11 hours of recommended amount of sleep for their age, while 73.4% of whom said they used social media for an hour or more daily showed even worse sleeping habits.

Twitter sometimes gets a bad rap. Early on, education critics bemoaned the idea of kids communicating in 140 characters and warned they would never learn to write properly. But Twitter, like all sorts of social media apps, has now made peace with many educators who have learned to harness its appeal to help them teach, as well as discuss with students the power and the possibilities of social media in an effort to drive digital literacy. A recent article entitled Teach Students To Use Social Media (The Right Way) And The Possibilities Are Endless on the National Public Radio education site (nprED) outlines many of the positive ways educators are using Twitter. This is a good read for parents who may be skeptical or just want to know more about how teachers are incorporating social media into the classroom.

In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, a coalition of children's health and education organizations individuals have called on Facebook to shut down Messenger Kids on behalf of the well being of children. Messenger Kids is the parent-monitored chat, photo, and video messaging service Facebook launched in December 2017 for children as young as six years old. The minimum age for regular Facebook users is 13.

This letter was published by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and signed by a host of other organizations. It argues that introducing children to social media at an earlier age will increase their dependence on digital devices, negatively affect their mental health, and impact their ability to form relationships. "Younger children are simply not ready to have social media accounts," the group wrote. "A growing body of research demonstrates that excessive use of digital devices and social media is harmful to children and teens, making it very likely this new app will undermine children’s healthy development."

Researchers at Stanford University's Center for Education Policy Analysis Labs are sending to parents and caregivers text messages containing educational games and tips on how to engage young children. These "nudge" techniques are designed to prepare children for school and to support their literacy, numeracy and social and emotional skills. The texts seem to be appreciated by parents who find, that since they arrive on their phones, they can scroll back to them and try the ideas on another day if they are too busy when the text first arrives or the resources to do the activity are not at hand. Texts are short and to the point usually suggesting things that can easily be done by parents, but truly enhance a preschooler’s literacy and numeracy.

Facebook is trying very hard to fix itself by dealing with the proliferation of fake news on site and doing what it can to keep the trolls at bay. But what if Facebook just needs to be more like Instagram? That’s the premise of a recent article in The New York Times entitled What if a Healthier Facebook Is Just … Instagram?.

It is an interesting idea. Instagram, while having some issues, has not been overrun by misinformation, hasn’t been as exploited to the same degree and, (this is a good reminder to the older generation) is vastly preferred to Facebook by younger users. It is a simpler cleaner interface with no external links and no ways to “reshare” others posts. Is this the wave of the future? Less is more?

Students may believe they can manage digital distractions via multitasking, but some research shows that multitasking leads to lower grades. Educators now are testing ways to help manage digital distractions, such as taking technology breaks. But what really drives the distraction? Most researchers feel that the prime suspect is FOMO – the “Fear of Missing Out” and that very human foible is very hard to fight.

Are your children making a speech in class or a presentation at a science fair or entering a speech competition? Here are a couple of tools that can help:

• Say What?: Kids (and parents) sometimes struggle with how to pronounce words that are part of a presentation on an unfamiliar topic. The Howjsay English Pronunciation Dictionary is available on the computer or as an app and gives you the standard pronunciation or alternative pronunciations (if applicable) of a wide variety of terms. It also supplies alternative definitions and synonyms.

• How Long is That Again?: The Speech in Minutes tool is helpful when kids are preparing for presentations or competitions in which they have a certain length of time to speak. Instead of timing their speech, they can use this tool to find out how long their talk should take and at what pace they are going to have to speak to get it all in. To do this, you first add your rate of speech (below average, average, above average) and then the number of words in the speech. The program tells you how many minutes you’re going to be talking.

Here is another vocabulary word for your ongoing discussions with your teen about the world of social media, “Finsta.” In the same kind of move that teens have employed for years on Facebook, creating one Facebook page for public consumption and another for their more private revelations, teens who want to post more freely on Instagram start fake, secret accounts known as "Finstas”. This is a combo of the words “fake” and “Instagram.” Teen’s Finsta accounts are typically more unfiltered than their regular Instagram accounts, and are designed to get around those parental and teacher warnings about being careful what you post because school and college administrators, parents, potential employers and others could view it. The term has been around a while but because Instagram seems to be the hotbed of cyberbullying these days, it has surfaced once again.

On the positive side, such acts of digital self-surveillance make sense against the backdrop of widespread media coverage of social media gaffes that teens have probably heard about or witnessed. This includes employees losing their jobs after publishing a distasteful image or a tactless tweet, or a teen losing a spot on a sports team, or a school leadership role because of sexually charged or derogatory items they posted online. But at its worst, Finsta accounts warp into a space where anonymous users hide scandalous or sexual behavior or partake in cyberbullying.

One other thing that you and your teens should know is that even if what a user posts is part of a private Finsta account with an anonymous username, account creators can be traced back by analyzing followers and Instagram activity. And those seemingly private posts can easily surface online if anyone takes a screenshot or records a video of the content. Once again, it can be very difficult to hide even in the seemingly anonymous online world.

Over 2 billion people around the world used a minimum of one of the top five social apps- Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Twitter  - every month in 2017, with Facebook taking top spot in the US and France and its WhatsApp messenger app dominating in the UK, Spain, Russia, Germany, India and Indonesia, per App Annie. Instagram's monthly average user numbers in the US have risen 30% in the past two years across both Android and  Apple’s iOS.

Facebook's latest news feed update will include a prioritization of news sources rated as trustworthy by "a diverse and representative sample" of its users, the company's News Feed chief Adam Mosseri wrote in a recent blog post. Publications with lower scores could see a decrease in distribution while there will also be an emphasis on promoting local news. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, recently writing on the same subject said that prioritizing news from trusted publishers is part of Facebook’s broader effort to revamp the News Feed and “encourage meaningful social interactions with family and friends over passive consumption.”

As an answer to the problem of technology addiction and not enough just plain old “face time,” school resource officers in the Hamilton Heights School Corporation in Indiana have created technology-free rooms in the middle and elementary schools.

The rooms were made available by the district following concerns about the social and emotional effect of screen time on young people and made available to students for 30 or 40 minutes during the day as a reward. Once they arrive at the room, kids have a chance to play board games, Jenga and foosball –all for some downtime with face time possibilities.

Have a young scientist to be in your midst? Looking for a way to make science more “real world” at your house? Citizen-science projects -- those that involve the public in collecting data – may be a way to encourage an active interest in science and find out what it takes to be a scientist. Try these links to find citizen science projects that might work for you: SciStarter, Zooniverse, Citizen Science Central from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Galaxy Zoo, Citizen Science from the Smithsonian Institution, and Citizen Scientists from NASA.

Recently the term “Black Mirror effect” has been cropping up more and more in literature on digital safety, and if you are not already familiar with the term, as a digital safety savvy parent you might want to become so. Black Mirror is a British science fiction show that appears on Netflix that examines modern society, particularly with regard to the unanticipated consequences of new technologies. The “Black Mirror effect” seems to be that young people are beginning to question the role of technology in their lives, as are their parents, because even when technology seems to have been developed for good, someone is always trying to pervert it into something bad or highly unsavory. Of course what that boils down to is that we don’t have a technology problem, we have a human one.

The Federal Trade Commission said online connected toy company VTech will pay a $650,000 settlement in a case in which children's email addresses and other data were gathered via online platforms called Planet VTech and apps like Kid Connect and then were hacked in November 2015. This is the FTC's first case involving toys that are connected back to the toy company online.

While both the online platform and apps are now defunct, VTech was accused of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires companies to obtain parents' consent before collecting personal data about their children under the age of 13. That law also requires companies to post privacy policies that offer complete descriptions about the data that is collected and give information about reviewing or deleting that data. The children's privacy law also requires companies to use reasonable data security practices to protect personal data.