Weeden, Cooke, and McVey (2013) surveyed nearly 200 elementary students between 7 and 12 years old. They found that students as young as 9 years old had social networking pages, despite the age restriction. To circumvent this restriction, children lied about their age, often with their parents’ knowledge. While many students realized that their photos and information posted are publicly available on these sites, 25% of the students did not. To address these concerns, Weeden, Cooke, and McVey (2013) suggest providing safety information to students and caregivers early. This would allow parents to help their students manage privacy settings and instruct students in responding to online harassment.
Until reading this article, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to children on the internet. I’ve been assuming that kids today are pretty tech savvy; more so than their parents. This article points out that my assumption is clearly a dangerous one. The internet opens kiddos up to the dangers of interacting with adults they don’t know in their own home. While we don’t need to make children afraid of the internet, we do need to make sure that they understand and interact safely.
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) put out a series of National Education Technology Standards (NETS) for administrators, coaches, computer science educators, teachers, and students. The student standards (NETS-S) address six areas: creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration, research and information fluency, critical thinking, problem solving and decision making, digital citizenship, and technology operations and concepts.
Considering the information Weeden and colleagues (2013) present, four of these standards apply to students and social media.
On the positive side, students (even young students) can use
social media for communication and collaboration with peers, specifically to “Interact,
collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of
digital environments and media” as per standard 2a. Social media also presents opportunities to “Locate,
organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a
variety of sources and media” and “Evaluate and select information sources and
digital tools based on the appropriateness to specific tasks” as per standards 3b
and c, respectively. Social media are
communication tools that allow students to coordinate and interact with a
diversity of people. These interactions
result in exchange of information that students must be able to evaluate and
use ethically.
As young students are not physiologically and emotionally
ready to always behave ethically using social media (i.e. cyberbullying), this
is certainly an area that teachers and caregivers should address. Additionally, the use of social media
provides opportunities for students to practice digital citizenship and understand
technology operations and concepts. Standards
5 and 6 are summarized as “students understand human, cultural, and societal issues
related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior” and “students
demonstrate a sound understanding of technology concepts, systems, and
operations.” These standards address
exactly what Weedan and colleagues (2013) suggest regarding online safety
awareness.
For young students, digital citizenship really means not
fabricating an age to use social media sites before the age of thirteen. However, as teachers cannot keep students
from creating such accounts away from the school setting, they can help
students share information legally and responsibly and understand that these
technology systems are often public; information shared cannot be retrieved or
erased. Based on Weeden and colleagues’
(2013) findings, elementary teachers clearly need to pay attention to these
standards, incorporating them into their daily curriculum.
