Check out our new ‘Parents’ Guide to Facebook’!

We ConnectSafely folk are pleased (and excited) to tell you about our new little Facebook guide for parents, educators, and everybody looking for the basics on the world’s most popular social networking site – what it is, why young people use it, how to turn it into a great parenting tool, and how to optimize its privacy settings for teens. I started NetFamilyNews 11 years ago on the premise that sound parenting of Net users is informed parenting, and I believe that now, with social media in force, more than ever. Our social networkers need our guidance and backup, and we need to understand social media in order to provide that. Here’s help. “A Parents’ Guide to Facebook” was written by my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid and me and is being published in partnership with the iKeepSafe Coalition (please go to one of the links above for more about them and us). The 32-page PDF version, which we’ll keep updated, is available for free at the link above or via FBparents.org. If you want to print out and distribute a number of copies, please just let us know, via admin@connectsafely.org, where or at what event you’ll be distributing them. We’ll be debuting the 35-page print edition at the Family Online Safety Institute’s annual conference in Washington on Tuesday. If you find the guidebook useful or think other parents and educators will, please help us spread the word. We want it to support as many social networkers – of both the teen and parental sorts – as possible.