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"How Tech Experts Monitor Their Teens on Social Media How can parents keep up with smartphones? Tech executives take various approaches to managing their children's social-media use"

A guide to staying safe and secure online from Google Explore quick tips and how-to's that explain what you can do to stay safe and secure on the web. Get advice from parents at Google and family safety experts on how to help your family safely surf the web. Learn how Google helps protect you.

"Search engines such as Google and popular cloud computing services may have been "sued out of existence" if they started in Australia, while consumers who make remixes or mash-ups of copyright songs and videos are also breaching the law. These are just some of the glaring issues with the Copyright Act that have been raised today by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) and copyright experts. The ALRC has released a new issues paper for its inquiry into whether Australia's copyright laws have kept up with the digital age."

The Cyber Safety Lady is Leonie Smith a cyber safety expert based in Sydney Australia. She gives internet safety advice and and eSafety talks and workshops for teachers, parents, children and business. A quarter of Australian children report they have been cyber bullied. Finding is impossible to keep up with your kids on technology? Do the children/students in your care have the right privacy settings on Facebook? Are your children protected from accessing adult content online? Are online Trolls affecting your business! Are your employees aware of what they are sharing online?

A new survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project finds that 80 percent of internet users participate in some kind of voluntary group or organization, compared to just 56 percent of non-internet users. And if you use social media, the percentages are even higher: 85 percent of Twitter users, for example, are group participants.

Your students may be able to update their Facebook status in a heartbeat, but can they also write a thoughtful letter to the editor, voice their opinion on a call-in radio show, or access local media to advocate for community action? How well would parents or teachers in your community do at those tasks? In Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, media literacy expert Renee Hobbs makes a strong case for deepening digital literacy -- not only for youth but for Americans of all ages. Improving our digital and media literacy will require nothing less than a national community education effort, Hobbs argues in a position paper recently published by the Aspen Institute and Knight Foundation. Sorting through the flood of information most of us encounter daily requires new knowledge and critical-thinking skills, she says.

""Cyber-bullying, because of its perceived anonymity and infinite on-line audiences, has attracted media spotlight with the advent and increased use of digital and social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter," said Prof. Shaheen Shariff, who has pioneered research into the phenomenon since she joined McGill's Faculty of Education eight years ago. Now, a McGill research team led by Shariff has launched a new website, www.definetheline.ca, to help kids better understand the risks and their responsibilities - and to help parents, teachers and policy makers sort through the issues and implications. It promises to become a valuable resource for educators across North America, providing advice from leading experts in a user-friendly format."

"By being proactive about internet safety, the Svanascinis are in the forefront of modern families. Too many, experts say, worry about what their kids are up to and what might happen to them but feel they lack the expertise to do much about it. With recent headlines about the potentially destructive effects of cyberbullying - and before that about online predators - those fears can take on an almost desperate edge. Forty-two per cent of kids have been bullied online, and 30 per cent have been threatened, according to i-SAFE, an internet safety non-profit organisation. "

"For a kid who already feels isolated or depressed, Facebook can be the opposite of what it is intended to be. Instead of bringing people into a sense of community, it can create a feeling of inferiority. Some experts believe it can even trigger those feelings in kids who are otherwise well adapted."

"In all my work on online child safety issues, I always try to stress how important education and media literacy efforts are. Indeed, technical parental control tools and methods, while important, should be viewed as just one part of a more holistic approach to encouraging digital literacy and digital citizenship. In recent years, many scholars and child development experts such as Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, Anne Collier and Larry Magid of ConnectSafely.org, Marsali Hancock of iKeepSafe, Common Sense Media, the Family Online Safety Institute, and many others have worked to expand traditional education and media literacy strategies to place the notion of digital citizenship at the core of their lessons and recommendations."

"At the same time, numerous well-meaning nonprofits appeared, seeking to help educators communicate with parents and students, but still through a lens of fear and protection. Many experts now believe this was very much the wrong approach. "We missed the boat by concentrating on internet predators," says Patti Agatston, a nationally recognized counselor and cofounder of Cyberbullyhelp.com. Larry Magid, codirector of ConnectSafely.org, concurs that "predation is statistically so unlikely that it's not where we should be putting our resources." "

Global perspective: Schools Japan are redoubling their efforts to teach students rules and ethics for their use of the Internet. Until recently, this kind of education mainly focused on preventing minors from accessing harmful websites. Nowadays, however, education experts agree on the importance of instilling a sense of online ethics early on, to prevent young people from engaging in behavior such as inappropriate use of documents, academic papers and other sources, as well as the questionable posting of photos to the Internet.

"From cyberbullying and photo sharing to digital footprints and online safety, the Connecting Families program helps parents and kids address important topics and have meaningful conversations about making great choices in their digital lives. This free, year long program includes everything parent facilitators need to encourage their schools and communities to use connected technologies in ways that are both fun and safe. Our resources include a step-by-step hosting guide, conversation topics, and printable resources to share -- all carefully researched and crafted by Common Sense educational technology experts. Get started with the Program Overview, and then follow the steps below."

The information and digital self-help on this site was developed in consultation with expert partners ReachOut Australia and Kids Helpline.

We don't just build a boat, we make it sail too. Our team of expert developers is adept in both front-end and back-end programming and are delivering innovative web solutions everyday.

This toolkit is the result of the collective efforts of the Global Citizenship Education Working Group (GCED-WG), a collegium of 90 organizations and experts co-convened by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution, and the United Nations Secretary General's Global Education First Initiative's Youth Advocacy Group (GEFI-YAG). To gather the measurement tools in this collection, the working group surveyed GCED programs and initiatives that target youth (ages 15-24). For the purposes of this project, GCED was defined as any educational effort that aims to provide the skills, knowledge, and experiences and to encourage the behaviors, attitudes, and values that allow young persons to be agents of long-term, positive changes in their own lives and in the lives of people in their immediate and larger communities (with the community including the environment).

Abstract: In the July/August 2011 edition of TechTrends, a group of AECT members and academic professionals explored the state of digital citizenship for students in K-12 through an article entitled: Digital Citizenship in K-12: It Takes a Village. Identified was a significant need for digital citizenship awareness by parents, educators, and students through a series of interviews, exploration of resources, reports, and surveys. In this current article, the purpose is to provide an updated perspective of the state of digital citizenship in the K-12 academic and professional environments as gathered from re-administering the 2010 survey and interviewing experts quoted in the 2010 article. Results showed the need for teaching digital citizenship at an earlier age, improved digital citizenship awareness by both educators and administrators, and a continued focus on the misuse and abuse of technology.

Susan McLean - the Australian cybersafety advisor

I have heard Susan McLean speak to year 6s from our local Primary Schools. She is a really engaging speaker and had the students admitting to putting in false ages to get a facebook account.

The Connect.ed program covers: cyberbullying; sexting; excessive internet use; mobile use; e-security; managing your digital reputation; and digital profiling. It also "advises teachers on what young people of all ages are doing online and draws on Australian experts in the cybersafety field, as well as on teachers and students themselves," ACMA says.