Teaching 5 years olds about Twitter

I tripped over this excellent TEDx presentation this morning... 2 enterprising infant school teachers embracing new technology to equip their charges not just with an understanding of how to use a particular platform, but rather more importantly about how to use the internet responsibly, whilst building their basic literacy and creative skills.  I'm sure there are many parents that would do well to watch and follow their example rather than remaining either ignorant of what their kids are watching / accessing /participating in on the web or are just fearful, often through their own ignorance, of what's going on and feeling swamped and helpless about what to do about it.

The video also talks of some of the parents' and the schools reactions to the initiative and the challenges these two smart teachers have faced.  Well worth the 19 minutes time investment, whether you have kids or not.

We can't change the digitally connected world, we can only embrace and adapt to what is happening, and more importantly society has a responsibility to equip the younger generations with skills to navigate it, which we should be pushing proactively.  Hats off to these two inspiring teachers at Meltham Primary School, great work!



Kids are growing up in a multi-device, multi-platform connected world. Fact. Tablets are growing in penetration fast... it's no longer a world with one device that can only be used in a supervised location. The recent OFCOM report on multi-screen / tv alternative choices refers to many parents being surprised that their kids could access the web on their iPod Touch devices.

iPad's are intuitive devices and incredibly valuable as an on the go entertainment/keep quiet solution - I was in a pub last Sunday sitting next to a table of 3 families, with 5 junior school-ish aged kids all sitting there on a device each (plus one with a book). My parents would never have allowed it, kids do need to learn how to behave in social situations too, but I can see and understand the trade off.

What surprised me more than that scenario though was a conversation earlier in the day with friends who were staying for the weekend with their train-obsessed 4 year old, who whilst we were chatting was happily watching one train video after another on YouTube on the iPad WHICH HAS NO EASY PARENTAL CONTROLS and you can't uninstall the app - sure there's some convoluted workarounds but....  Come on Apple - I was appalled.  The parents had tried hiding the app in folders, but to no avail.. and so they were stumped.. a child happily pressing "related video" train pictures to watch video after video, but no means to ensure that he didn't randomly stumble over something inappropriate.

Food for thought...or rather fuel for action?

I love this video piece from Nike to highlight the health issues associated with today's increasingly sedentary kids.  Frightening when you stop to think about it, a generation likely to die 5 years younger than their parents generation.

An inspiring, simple, and effective piece asking kids what they'd do with 5 more years to live.  Good question.  My particular favourite was the kid that wanted to teach his sister to eat tuna :-)  What a selfless thought - unusual in little kids to have such an outward facing perspective.



All this, to help the cause Designedtomove.org - well worth a mooch around. Sure it might help Nike sell a few more trainers but, it's the contribution to the bigger cause that I like about it.

 Technology might be a contributing factor in the problem, but I'm sure with lateral thinking it can also be harnessed to help solve it too.  It just needs some left field thinking about, just like the Westpac Impulse Saver app, which remains one of my recent -ish favourite examples of technology well applied to insight.

Kids love playing games, they're competitive, they're tech savvy. Technology has already been harnessed to help us track activity (think NIKE Fuel band amongst many such things, apps, hardware or a combination), now it just needs to be accessible and affordable - not many parents will be giving their 5 year old an iPhone and trusting them to use it responsibly.

Kids online & changing information preferences

I grew up in a world of text.(The escapism, stimulation and endless open possibilties offered by reading captured my imagination at a very young age. I've been an avid reader since the age of 3, at which point I aspired to be a librarian. That didn't quite happen, but I still read an awful lot, professionally and personally.

Yet, however well assimilated I might be as a digital immigrant, my outlook and my information processing preferences will always be different to the kids growing up today. Kids today are used to control in so many areas of their lives. What they want to watch, where and when they want to watch it and on which screen are choices I didn't have as a child. I watched what was on TV when it was on, or I did something else instead. Control and video content go hand in hand for them.

So no surprises then that the top thing kids are searching for online is "YouTube". They live in a multi-sensory, multi-media world and are used to consuming and processing information in a far more visual fashion than I do. They learn from videos as well as seeing them as entertainment. Their preferences for video content should be challenging the way we/brands think about engaging and interacting with them. Are we still providing text / static image content because that's the way we are used to processing information?

We're humans, we're all evolving all the time, our language and communications styles are changing and new forms of etiquette or netiquette are evolving for these new channels. I wouldn't dream of writing a letter or an email using the abbreviated style I SMS / text in, yet I able-y text in abbreviated form in several languages. Some of us at least have learned to write and decode what to others appears to be a whole new language.

I'm still a wee bit baffled by one of the bigger YouTube phenomenons for kids, Fred, a series of video diaries by a high-pitched squeaky voiced kid, but that's probably just because I'm not 10.
But let's not just blame it on age, because my preferences are changing too, facilitated by the evolution of technology. I'm now watching more video content online. My TV hasn't been turned on in 4 months, and the last "TV" programme I watched was in March, on the BBC's amazing catch up service iPlayer. I watched it on my laptop. Who needs TV when there's TED anyway?

I now manage the vast amount of digital information I process in a day differently from the way I did a year or so ago. Increasingly I am unsubscribing from email newsletters and signing up instead to RSS feeds for some things and following others on Twitter.

My email inboxes are much more about person-to-person communication, just as they were before I started allowing brands to talk to me in that space. This makes my inbox processing less onerous and quicker. Maybe it's my OCD-side but I like to feel on top of my inbox. I am making different choices about what I need to read and act upon now, what I want to read but is less time-sensitive, and what I like to keep an overview of in terms of new news. Working in the digital space things become old news quickly.

My RSS feeds (the things I want to read, but don't need to be read now, generally bloggers who have interesting points of view), I now get displayed in a much more fun magazine style format thanks to Feedly. Industry alerts I tend to follow via feeds on Twitter. These allows me to process a vast amount more information at a glance, which saves me time and enables me to prioritise much more swiftly what I want to dig into in more detail.

Tweetdeck has vastly improved my Twitter experience, so if you haven't yet ventured into the Twittersphere, then installing it would be my top tip! I'm currently following a new brand or two for and I a week at a time (this week it's Innocent Smoothies and Top Shop) as I explore how different companies and brands are using the tool. It's very interesting.