It really makes sense the National PTA will be promoting Internet safety with Facebook’s help. “The world’s largest online social network and the National PTA will work together to build a program to provide information and support about such issues as cyberbullying, good online citizenship and Internet security,” Yahoo News reports. It makes sense for a lot of reasons: 1) The PTA is all about local, face-to-face, school-community-based child advocacy, and most of kids’ social networking is all about what’s going on in school; 2) the research shows that dealing with cyberbullying, the most common online risk, requires a whole-school-community approach (see this); and 3) the partnership is symbolic of what we said in the OSTWG report last week, that children’s online experiences are embedded in “real life”: online meets offline now more than ever (here’s my post about the report). Online-safety solutions going forward need to factor this in and work from the kid out – training the adults closest to young people in digital media, fostering child-adult communication, and teaching and modeling good citizenship and new media literacy from the moment kids pick up connected devices. Here’s CNN’s coverage of the Facebook/NPTA announcement, but it mistakenly refers to the Online Safety & Technology Group’s report as a PTA. [See also: “Students on bullying.“]
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