Comments on: Parents want to know http://www.thethinkingstick.com/parents-want-to-know/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=parents-want-to-know Educator Consultant Author Sun, 12 Feb 2012 01:10:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Christopher Harris http://www.thethinkingstick.com/parents-want-to-know/#comment-869 Christopher Harris Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:31:16 +0000 http://www.thethinkingstick.com/?p=94#comment-869 Wow. Great presentation on a very important topic. I have been doing classroom blogging presentations recently, and one of the things I do is spend time on an uncensored look at the schools' students' myspace and livejournal pages. I tell the teachers up front that they will see things that will disgust, anger, concern, and downright shock them. Then I make them pledge not to "freak out" and to engage in a conversation with students instead of accusations. One of them came up to me afterwards and said that while he was worried as a teacher, he was totally freaking out as a parent. He wanted to know how to search to see if his children had pages. When I offered to help, he said that he just wanted to know how so he could do the search in private - he was concerned about what he might find out was going on that he knew nothing about. He also suggested that I should offer classes for parents through the local adult education program in my organization or as a travelling show in local libraries. I knew I needed to do this, but other things have been keeping me busy over the last two weeks since the workshop. Thank you for reminding me that this is a NOW issue. If we don't have a realistic conversation about things like cyber-bullying and what is appropriate for kids on the web, then we will just get more of this: http://digg.com/links/ANOTHER_Girl_Killed_by_MySpace_Date_ Wow. Great presentation on a very important topic. I have been doing classroom blogging presentations recently, and one of the things I do is spend time on an uncensored look at the schools’ students’ myspace and livejournal pages. I tell the teachers up front that they will see things that will disgust, anger, concern, and downright shock them. Then I make them pledge not to “freak out” and to engage in a conversation with students instead of accusations. One of them came up to me afterwards and said that while he was worried as a teacher, he was totally freaking out as a parent. He wanted to know how to search to see if his children had pages. When I offered to help, he said that he just wanted to know how so he could do the search in private – he was concerned about what he might find out was going on that he knew nothing about. He also suggested that I should offer classes for parents through the local adult education program in my organization or as a travelling show in local libraries. I knew I needed to do this, but other things have been keeping me busy over the last two weeks since the workshop.

Thank you for reminding me that this is a NOW issue. If we don’t have a realistic conversation about things like cyber-bullying and what is appropriate for kids on the web, then we will just get more of this: http://digg.com/links/ANOTHER_Girl_Killed_by_MySpace_Date_

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