Web literacy for our kids please

Clié, Clara and Cleo
Clié, Clara and Cleo

I used to learn about new songs from the radio, TV or from the cool friends I have in school, but nowadays I’m learning about them from my kids. “Price Tag” from Jessie J, “Super Bass” from Nicki Minaj, “1000 Years” from Christina Perri just to name a few. The best part is my 10 year old daughter Clié learnt about these popular songs from kids just like her doing covers on Youtube from another part of the world.

The future is arriving faster than we know it and the world is getting smaller, much smaller. This hyper connected world is the only world our kids know about. To my 2 year old Clara, Elmo lives in every smartphone, tablet, desktop, laptop and even our TV at home.

Sometimes I ask, are our kids ready for it? How do we go about teaching them web literacy? I still have friends believing scams online like the one where Starbucks is giving out $100 vouchers on Facebook. How will our kids be able to discern what is real and what is not. More importantly, how do we get them to stay away from the bad neighbourhood online.

We can’t wait for mainstream web literacy classes for kids to happen. It will be too late. As parents, I feel other then teaching them spelling on a weekly basis, we should also spend time teaching them how to access the rich source of information that is available online. It’s like knowing how to use a pen, how to read, how to count money.

My 8 year old daughter Cleo loves watching kids on Youtube play with their toys and making stories with them. Its just like how we used to play when we were young, but with the addition of undersea internet cables, videography skills, post production know how, etc.

So in the very near future, the skill sets our kids should have might not be the ones we currently think they need.

Right now for my kids, I think knowing how to use the internet is important and eventually I would want to teach them how to start creating digital content and sharing them online.

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