Youth need privacy for healthy growth, development, and to work through ideas. Yet in these monitoring-obsessed days of child-rearing, privacy is often thrown to the side in exchange for surveillance. 

That's why innovative educators help parents see past simplified safety advice like: only use technology in a communal area. While imposing such restrictions is easy and may give a false sense of security, it is ineffective.

Here's why:

Does not foster trust

What's better than monitoring is working to foster trust and staying connected with your child. When you have developed connections and communication, your child is more likely to share what she’s up to.

Drives behavior underground

Monitoring doesn't stop bad behavior, it drives it underground. Find out for yourself. Ask a teen who's monitored if it makes them stop doing something or just become better at lying about what they're doing.

Your child needs privacy 

Wanting privacy goes along with the development of independence. A young person doesn't want all their thoughts, feelings, and creations on display. Privacy allows young people to work out their thinking and feelings in a safe place.

Does not promote safe independent use

Your child is not always going to be using technology at home and you are not always going to be there to monitor them. More effective than surveillance is supporting your child in using technology effectively. This means fostering a trusting relationship where you can speak to one another.

What do you think? Is this in alignment with advice you give parents? How are you helping to instill responsible use in the youth with whom you work? 

Lisa Nielsen (@InnovativeEdu) has worked as a public-school educator and administrator since 1997. She is a prolific writer best known for her award-winning blog, The Innovative Educator. Nielsen is the author of several booksand her writing has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, Tech&Learning, and T.H.E. Journal.  

K–12 educators and administrators are tasked with building safe and effectivedigital learning environments, and this responsibility includes shielding studentsfrom inappropriate content online.

Traditionally, this has involved monitoring and filtering web access by keeping listsof appropriate and inappropriate websites. But the Internet is constantly changing.The dynamic nature of the web makes traditional URL-based filtering—the processof categorizing entire web pages by their domains—a largely ineffective method ofcontrolling the kinds of content that students access.

Fortunately, a new method has emerged that uses artificial intelligence to analyzethe actual content on web pages in real time, allowing students to see only materialthat educators deem safe and productive. Content-based filtering marks a differentapproach to keeping students safe online—one that’s proving to be both moreaccurate and easier for educators to manage.

Click here to download the full white paper.

Kids today! If you believed the headlines, you'd think that technology has created a generation of kids who are impatient, bored, and entitled. While that could be true, don't blame the kids or the tech. It is up to the adults in their worlds to ensure we raise kids who know how to be safe and responsible digital citizens.Educators do this by following the curriculum from providers like Common Sense Education, Google’s “Be Internet Awesome,” and EverFi’s “Ignition.”

I asked a group of Common Sense Educators which sites they recommend for parents.

Below are the resources they suggested schools can share to support parents in keeping their children safe online.

5 Digital Citizenship Resources for Parents

• Social Media Guidelines - NYC
  These are the student guidelines schools share with parents. There are also guides for parents, infographics, and an activity book that go along with the guidelines.
• Digital Citizenship Responsibilities - NYC
  New York City Schools educators created plain language guidance to advice for supporting good digital citizenship with students and infographics to accompany this advice.

How do you implement 22,000 Chromebooks in a district with 93,000 students—while giving teachers an easy way to manage the devices in their classrooms? Or allow students to access resources like YouTube safely and productively during the school day?

Teacher’s choice for classroom management, while providing administrators with unparalleled filtering and analytics. Lee County School District in Florida is solving their challenge with an award-winning filtering and classroom management software. GoGuardian gives the district full visibility into how students use their devices, along with a host of tools to make learning safer, more personalized, and productive. More here.

Teach kids valuable digital habits, while keeping them safe inside and outside of the classroom. With this software, educators at Denton ISD in Texas have full visibility into how students are using their Chromebooks. Students can use resources like YouTube safely and productively, and the district can even send real-time personalized messages that empower students to become better digital citizens.

Learn how Denton ISD is teaching digital citizenship—one message at a time.

Personalized Learning in a Large District
Dwayne Alton, Director of IT/Support for the School District of Lee County explains how GoGuardian’s scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure allowed more teacher and student engagement while increasing implementation throughout their district.