Four tips for managing your kids’ screen time
Minimize screen use, especially for the youngest children:
Minimize screen use, especially for the youngest children:
With Christmas approaching, video games are the one media industry that seems recession-proof, with games topping many wish lists. Parents, though, can find it difficult to tell just what they're buying for their children. They may know about Grand Theft Auto, for instance, but may wonder what kind of sins are in Sins of a Solar Empire. Of course, nobody wants to disappoint their children: if parents decide not to buy Gears of War, will little Johnny be happy with Rock Band instead? Fortunately, there are both tools and techniques at hand to help parents identify games they might find inappropriate and also to pick appropriate games their children will like.
It’s ironic that as computers and other communications technology have become more accessible to the general public over the last thirty years, they have actually become less accessible to a segment of the population, one to whom access is everything: people with disabilities. More ironic still is that the history of communications technology is intimately tied to the drive to integrate people with disabilities more fully into society.
Contemporary communication means that the boundaries of genre once controlled by conventions are being smashed as advertising enters journalism and live voices are replaced by texts or tweets. I believe these changes have made the key concepts more relevant and more important to understanding communication in the revolution of convergence. More than ever students need to understand the modes of communication and then obtain the necessary skills to do so in the convergence revolution.
February 11 is Safer Internet Day, an annual international event organized by InSafe to help promote safer and more responsible use of online technologies, especially by young people.
In the educational game 'A Day in the Life of the Jos', students in grades six to eight help the brother and sister team Jo and Josie with situations they encounter online as they go about a typical day in their lives.
People who make their living producing images, such as photographers, stylists, publicists, directors and pop idols, learn how to use those signs to convey the impression they want to make. Although teen girls who are trying to send a signal to their circle of friends and pop music producers who are trying to send a signal to an audience of millions are working on different scales, the principle is very much the same. Depending on your audience, you need to tailor the signals you send out very carefully. Even your age can have a certain amount of wiggle room when dressed in the right signs.
It's nearly time to go back to school, and for teachers that means back to one of the profession's most frustrating tasks -- preventing, detecting and dealing with plagiarism. Plagiarism, academic and otherwise, is an old problem; Newton and Leibnitz accused each other of it, and Helen Keller was so shaken by an accusation of having stolen her story "The Frost King" that she turned from fiction to writing the autobiography for which she is remembered. Still, comparing today's lifting of information to the sort of plagiarism that took place as recently as ten years ago is like comparing home cassette taping to online file-sharing
Cyber Choices is an interactive game designed to help students in grades 3 to 5 develop the skills and habits they need to make safe and responsible choices online. Cyber Choices lets students explore four different stories that cover key issues such as making good choices about their own and others’ personal information, dealing with cyberbullying (as both a target and a witness) and managing online conflict.