Your Kid's Future Depends On Their Online Behavior Now

Photo by Paul Hocksenar
Used Under a Creative Commons License

Whether you are a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, pastor, educator, or any other adult who has a vested interest in or cares about a child, teen, or young adult, I hope your care extends to what the young people in your life are doing online.

Do you understand how much of their future could be depending on the things they are posting right now on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Vine, or pick-whatever-social-media-tool is popular today? Do they understand it?

Based on what I see kids in my own community posting on Twitter, I think there's a huge lack of understanding out there.

I've read stories and talked about them over and over and over, but I don't think my retelling of such tales has any impact. At least, not as much as the original tales themselves should have.

So, I started collecting the stories, including direct interviews of and original Tweets posted by those who may hold the future opportunities of kids just like the ones you care for in their hands. You'll see many examples relating to athletes, but there are non-athlete examples as well.

Maybe seeing these stories will convince you as a caring adult to not bury your head in the sand and ignore the online behavior of the kids your care about. Or maybe showing these original examples to the kids you care about will help you educate them and get their attention. I don't know. But having this resource can't hurt.

I am using an online tool called Storify to curate these stories, and I will continue adding to the list. So feel free to bookmark or favorite or pin this post and revisit it on occasion.

And please, do more than just save it to your list of resources. Use the information here to educate yourself and others that the online actions of immature young people can slam shut doors of future opportunity for them. Use the information to convince yourself that you aren't being nosy or intrusive or overbearing when you take an interest in what the kids in your life are doing online and offer them advice and guidance. If you're an educator, come up with ways to integrate this topic into your classroom, even if it's just an occasional informal discussion. If you're a parent, use it as a reason to set clear expectations for online behavior early on with your tweens.

Here's hoping for a bright future for all of the kids we love and care for...

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 All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

Handheld Digital Magazines - An Intriguing Concept

Being that it's almost 2010, it's somehow appropriate to blog about this really cool concept video that came across my Twitter stream via @levarburton (Yep, of Roots, Reading Rainbow, and Star Trek fame!). Mr. Burton's exact Twitter words that intrigued me and made me click to watch the video were "8 minutes that rocked my world! This changes the ereading game...!"

To quote the purpose of the video from its web page:

This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for digital magazines in the near future, presented by our design partners at BERG.

The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories.

I was fascinated by this video and the digital magazine concept. Being a lover of reading, I was mostly struck by the idea of trying to preserve some of the traditional paper-based reading experience while moving to a digital medium. I'm actually encouraged by this.

One of the issues I have having been born and learning to read in the pre-digital era is the experience of reading is not the same quality for me when I am reading on a computer screen. I have not as of yet tried a Kindle or any other brand of e-reader simply because the idea of reading an entire novel on a small digital screen holds no appeal for me. I realize as an educator that this is the way things are going, and I should probably force myself to try an e-reader or e-book, but I don't really want to invest in one when it appeals to me so little.

The conceptual digital magazine caught my interest, though. I wanted to hold it and try it out. I think the fact that I would interact with it makes me think it will be closer to the paper-based experience I am used to. I also started to imagine the possibilities for longer works - plays, short stories, even novels - where more graphics could be incorporated with the text. Not that I want to ever give up being able to imagine the settings and events in my head, but think of classic works of literature with historically accurate graphical backgrounds enhancing the text. Or works set in the future with the author's concepts of the settings visually represented.  Just leave the characters out so I can still picture them in my mind, please. :-)

Anyway, you can see the video stirred up some ideas in my head. Take about eight minutes to view it, and see if it does the same for you. Maybe it will "rock your world" as well!



Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.