Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Making Social Media Safe For Kids

About a month ago I attended an excellent panel discussion on social media and raising your kids in the social-media world. After all, even though certain sites fade and new ones come in, social media and the internet life in general is never going away. It's a part of our culture, and rather than running from it or sheltering our children from it, we should educate ourselves in the best ways to handle the excessive amounts of information that keep coming at them. Tackling it head-on is probably the best way to keep our kids safe, and keep them open and communicating with us. The bottom line is talk to your kids, about the benefits as well as the dangers. The more you educate yourself about something, the less scary it becomes.

There is also a great slide show to go with the audio! Here is the direct link, but as you see it is embedded below as well. The slides about Facebook (to make it more interactive with listening) begin at about 5min. 12seconds in the audio. The entire audio is 1hr. 34min.

Audio Download (right click): http://media.libsyn.com/media/audioaddict/SocialMediaKidsPanel.mp3


Thanks to Katie Charland for putting this together, and to all the panelists for participating! I hope there will be more of these in the future.