On visiting my doctor recently for a health check, I was encouraged to have a ‘live blood analysis’. For those who haven’t experienced such an event, it is where an expert practitioner takes a small finger prick of blood and completes a ‘live’ analysis of your blood’s (and of course, your) well being. Whilst you [...]

I was visiting a private South Yarra primary school the other day. In fact, I was out there twice in the same week, delivering cyber-citizenship talks to different year groups. I was amazed at how much even the very young children know of the key safe-online messages.
But equally flummoxed by just how little empathy some [...]

Despite the skills of the ‘tech savvy’ students in her class in Geelong, Australia, Kathleen McGeady is cautious about describing them in Marc Prensky’s terms as ‘Digital Natives’.
Although Jewel Topsfield from The Age, who spent a day watching them blog, Skype and collaborate using web tools, described them as such (http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/digital-natives-restless-20100820-1390k.html), Kathleen is more circumspect.
She [...]

Long time technology author and commentator, David Kirkpatrick has recently released ‘The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World’.
For those of you who want to understand the increasing place of Facebook in our kids’ lives it is well worth a read – not that it is gripping stuff, but [...]

http://yourkidsed.com.au/info/
Sophia Dimitropoulos as the founder and director of YourKidsEd, has created a fantastic Australian resource for parents and carers of children of all ages. There is so much on the site, check it out – and join up for regular email updates, its free!
Essentially the site aims to inform and empower parents to make decisions [...]

Powerful, unsettling, all too realistic..
An 8 year-old girl lives alone with her mother and dreams of a better life beyond the walls of their small and rundown apartment. Isolated and lonely, the girl’s only friend is her doll, Polly. From her window she sees other children playing happily in a park and desperately wants to [...]

A child’s journey into the teenage years will involve developing an ability to make independent, grown-up decisions – and struggling with their parents over the more difficult or sensitive of these. It’s common for parents and teenagers to disagree about how much independence a young person should have. So, when should young people be able to make their own decisions [...]

As we move slowly but steadily into the brighter skies of spring and summer, I wonder just what the effects are of removing the sun from our kids’ lives – with all that slip, slap, slopping of sunscreen, now up to SPF 80+ in NZ (although due to the lobbying of the Cancer Foundation, I believe [...]

From a report by NetFamily News (NetFamilyNews.org) on 26 August.

A whopping 90% of US 9-12 year-olds play online games, according to a survey by M2 Research <http://www.m2research.com/kids-and-games-report-release.htm>. 
Broken down by gender, 91% of boys and 93% of girls play games online, M2 says.
The survey of 5,000 children and teens nationwide also found that Facebook is now the [...]

Who’d have thought you could even get this rubbish (that passes for research) in print..
“GRANTING teenagers access to computers can actually diminish their reading and maths results, according to a new study. The Sunday Telegraph reports a survey of more than half a million children reveals technology is counter-productive in improving student achievement.
It found that [...]