Remote learning requires new strategies to help kids develop healthy friendships online, says Phyllis Fagell, a school counselor in Washington, D.C. In an interview, Fagell suggests ideas for teachers in being purposeful when pairing students for projects and using tools such as Zoom to help students mediate any disputes, and discusses how to involve parents in the process of growing friendships.
The California Partners Project partnered with the Child Mind Institute to take a deep look at how life during Covid is being experienced by teens who are coping with loss, social isolation, and screen saturation. A report called “Are the Kids Alright?” includes in-depth interviews with 46 teenagers, between 13 and 17 years old, in California. The surveyed teens were asked to keep detailed, week-long journals of their habits and lifestyles.
While a relatively small sampling and based solely in California, the study did find that many teens are struggling, relying heavily on screens to handle the isolation of the past several months. Other key findings included that teens are experiencing “a tremendous loss due to school closure and social isolation" and are using "social media and gaming (as) the main way to meet their social needs." Also, the extent of their technology use and its impact "aren't obvious, even to those closest to teens," according to the report.
Included in the report are several ways parents can connect with and support their kids. Parents should support sleep by encouraging healthy behaviors like regular bedtimes, not eating large meals late in the evening, and not consuming caffeine more than four hours before going to bed. Parents should also try to encourage exercise, since moderate exercise each day can promote restorative sleep and aid health. It can also help to create a schedule that teens can stick to.
Parents are also urged to model behavior they want to see their kids follow. Parents looking to promote healthy screen time boundaries should be aware of how frequently they use technology, and should brainstorm and support alternative activities that can be used to fill time. It can also help to encourage "tech mindfulness:" Basically, when you pick up your phone, think about why you're using the device and what you hope to get out of it.
Schools are focusing on masks, social distancing and cleaning as they reopen, but administrators should create a plan to address bullying and cyberbullying of children who contract COVID-19, writes Dr. Joshua Barocas, an infectious diseases physician. "We need to ensure that they are not only protected from the virus, but also from any stigma associated with it," Barocas writes.
With an end to virtual learning not yet in sight, schools should focus on "access to consistent, high-quality remote or online learning," according to 54% of parents surveyed by the National Parents Union. 37% said they thought a safe return to in-person instruction should be prioritized. The survey also reviews parent opinions on learning loss, state testing and schools’ decision-making processes.
Young children are watching a wide range of videos on YouTube that are chock full of advertisements, sometimes have violent footage, and offer little educational value, according to a report from academics and Common Sense Media in their annual survey of kids and media. YouTube is a juggernaut in kids’ media, and viewership has shot up during the pandemic. But the company has struggled to police the videos that kids watch, even after investing deeply in ways to better moderate children’s content once it became a political problem. The new report argues that YouTube hasn’t done enough. Researchers collected more than 1,600 videos from 191 parents that their children, all younger than 8, watched on YouTube’s main site this year. Among the findings: Ads were present on 95% of the videos in the study. A fifth of the ads were categorized as age inappropriate -- a bourbon commercial on a nail painting video for girls; another ad, during a video game clip, that asked, “should the U.S. deport illegal immigrants?”
“Protecting kids and families is a top priority for us,” a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement responding to the report. “Because YouTube is not for children, we’ve invested significantly in the creation of the YouTube Kids app, a destination made specifically for kids to explore their imagination and curiosity. We’re encouraged by the report’s findings that 63% of parents supervise their kids’ experience on YouTube, but continue to recommend parents use YouTube Kids if they plan to allow kids under 13 to watch independently.”
Sixty-seven percent of teachers report using more digital books this year than last, according to a survey of 300 teachers and 100 administrators by OverDrive Education. Of those surveyed, a majority said they were conducting at least some instruction online. This of course, is a sign of the times, but important now more than ever to keep in mind the students that lack access to technology. Among teachers in rural schools, 58% say they don’t use any ebooks in their classes.
Equity -- along with health data, safety protocols, labor negotiations and political pressure -- is part of the equation in determining whether to reopen school buildings, education leaders say. Joris Ray, a superintendent in Tennessee, doesn't want to risk reopening when many of his district's families do not have health insurance, and Derek Turner, a district operations chief in Maryland, notes the "layers of complexity" involved in deciding in an article entitled Making a School Reopening Decision and Taking the Heat.
Interested in learning how you and your kids can navigate today’s challenging information highway? Use the interactive lessons on Checkology, which includes free materials available for anyone to use on the News Literacy Project site (a more extensive set of lessons is available for a fee to classrooms as well). You will learn how to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources, and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods. Checkology will give you the habits of mind and tools to evaluate and interpret information. And just for fun while on that site, take the news literacy quiz about fighting falsehoods on social media. What do you know about the various social media platforms’ misinformation policies?
Students are prepared to get behind the wheel and navigate busy roads, but not to investigate a complicated information superhighway, writes Liz Ramos, who teaches history and US government at a California high school. In a recent commentary, Ramos writes that the US election has highlighted the importance of teaching news literacy in schools so students learn to think critically and be informed, engaged citizens. She cites Finland as an example of a country that is teaching information literacy in grade school, seamlessly integrating it across subjects. In math class, students learn how statistics can be used to distort. In art class, they see how the meaning of an image can be manipulated. In history, they examine propaganda, and in Finnish language classes, students learn how words can be used to confuse, mislead and deceive.
Lauren Gehr, an English teacher at a South Carolina high school, says that kids' use of social media is affecting their academic work -- including using "social media speak" in classwork. In an article written for teachers but with useful hints for parents, Gehr shares tech tools like NoRedInk and FlipGrid to help kids drop certain habits from their work, such as abbreviating words, using slang, and writing too quickly.
Americans are divided on both whether offensive content online is taken seriously enough, and on which is more important online: free speech or feeling safe. Republicans and Democrats have grown further apart when it comes to these issues since 2017. Overall, 55% of Americans say many people take offensive content they see online too seriously, while a smaller share (42%) say offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted in early September 2020. In addition, about half of Americans (53%) say it’s more important for people to be able to feel welcome and safe online, compared with 45% who believe it’s more important for people to be able to speak their minds freely online, according to an earlier Center survey fielded in July 2020.
The election may be over, but the past four years has shown not just how fast the news moves, but how inaccurately. Finding vetted sources for our kids is more important now than ever. Four current affairs podcasts for kids were recently reviewed and recommended for kids in an article in The New York Times. The list includes daily, weekly and bi-weekly shows. Interested in building your kids critical thinking skills? Try The Big Fib, a show for 7 to12 year olds. The show has a fact-or fiction theme, such as “Toilets,” in which a 9-year-old named Theo has to figure out whether a civil engineer named Gloria really created a solar-powered toilet, or if the other grown-up in the hot seat, Joe, is really an expert plumber. It’s a goofy premise that nevertheless shows children how to be good skeptics and equips them with the critical-thinking tools they need to interpret the world around them.
It is almost the end of 2020 and while technology seems even more tightly woven into our lives, the election has shown that there are still times when it is essentially irrelevant. Let’s face it, most American voting systems use old technology if they use technology at all, and the (permanent record) pieces of paper scrutinized by so many diligent vote counters all worked pretty well, even if it seemed a bit slow. Technology can be an incredibly useful tool, but it has drawbacks and may not always be the answer to everything.
Many of us look to find things that will help us find our happy place, and music streaming service Spotify announced recently that many people are using their service to do just that, by creating their own mental health playlist. Spotify has seen a 57% increase in streams related to “mindfulness,” “calm” and “self-care” since last year. Podcasts related to self-help and self-care also saw a dramatic bump on the platform, with a whopping 122-percent increase in streams.
Of course, what exactly constitutes a “mental health playlist” is slightly less clear. Every mind is different — both when it comes to personal taste and actual brain chemistry — and what one person finds relaxing another may find to be grating. Some people may turn to guided meditation to unwind, while others may gravitate toward a playlist of soothing new-age ones from the likes of Enya and Yanni. Maybe ambient instrumentals are what get you feeling Zen, while death metal might feel like a cathartic release to someone else. Still, having a mental health playlist is one way your digital devices could add calm to your life.
The coronavirus pandemic upended traditional college admissions testing, with many students registered to take the exams unable to do so, and about 30% of testing sites closed. The College Board says a remote SAT is under consideration, and some schools are administering an online SAT. Fewer students being able to take the exams will hurt test-makers' revenue and could cause colleges to extend their test-optional policies.
Almost half of child influencers ranging from ages 3 to 14 are promoting food and beverage products through their YouTube videos, with over 90% of them being for unhealthy or fast-food brands, researchers reported in Pediatrics. The findings also showed that videos featuring food or drinks were viewed over 1 billion times.
In a recent piece from The Geek Journal notes that teachers are relying on parents' involvement during remote instruction in many ways, yet some teachers say parental involvement is sometimes disruptive. Examples include parents asking questions during live, online lessons, prompting their children to speak, or even texting teachers during lessons.
Since Snapchat is a staple in tween and teen’s social media repertoire, parents may be interested in some insights from Snapchat’s second annual "Friendship Report." 47% of respondents say their friendships are closer during the pandemic. 60% of Snapchat users say the platform helps them to strengthen friendships, 44% use video to maintain friendships and the report notes, "The findings showed how 'social' is being inserted back into social media."
Virtually every American is making at least one mistake protecting their data, says author Joseph Steinberg of "Cybersecurity for Dummies." A survey of more than 2,500 adults by Bankrate.com finds four in five people reuse passwords, while the next most common mistakes are saving passwords on a phone or computer and saving payment information on a device to make shopping faster and easier. Other behaviors Americans admit to doing include: using an ATM somewhere other than a financial institution (28 percent), carrying a Social Security card in a purse or wallet (26 percent), throwing away or recycling personal documents without shredding first (23 percent), and posting their birth date on social media (15 percent).
Netflix’s recent documentary The Social Dilemma has become a topic of conversation on television, radio and podcasts lately, and many teachers and parents are using it to teach digital or media literacy. The definition of digital or media literacy – according to the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) – is “the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, CREATE, and ACT using all forms of communication” and there couldn’t be a timelier topic. Take a look at this article from the MiddleWeb site for some ideas on places to start with your kids at looking at this topic, and as a guide to the documentary.