Ad4dcss/Digital Citizenship

What You Can Do If you are concerned about your children accessing adult material from their wireless phones/devices, consider the following: Monitor how your children are using their wireless phones or other wireless devices. For example, are they using them mainly for talking, or are they using them for messaging, taking photos and downloading applications? Check with your carrier to see what types of material it offers and what types can be accessed from your children’s handsets. Check with your carrier to see if there are ways to prevent access to and downloading of content that may contain inappropriate material and that is available on a per-use or per-application basis (e.g., games, wall paper images, songs). Monitor your bill. Any content purchases made from a wireless phone should appear on your monthly bill, so check your bill to see if any purchases have been made from your children’s phones/devices. The FCC requires that the descriptions of charges on wireless carrier bills be full, clear, non-deceptive, and in plain language. Check with your carrier to see what handsets are available for your children that are not capable of accessing advanced applications that may contain adult material. Check with your carrier to see whether subscriptions to wireless data or wireless Internet packages also offer access to adult material on your children’s phone.

hildren like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

n fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.