fiona lucas Archives - iRespectOnline

September 10, 2013 By Fiona Lucas

The Connected Family: 5 Fab ideas for safer social media FUN

Author and online reputation educator Fiona Lucas shares 5 ways to balance “real” life and social media to connect with your family for the best of both worlds!

Families are so busy these days that it may seem easier for parents to leave children playing with smartphones, ipads and other devices to keep them entertained. These devices and online games can be highly addictive and once habits form, it can be very hard to break them.

We need to try and find a balance so that we remember that our devices are merely tools to help us to achieve a goal, and are not more important that spending time with each other. We don’t want our future childhood memories to consist of the high score they got on “angry birds”! Further the “good” use of the internet and social media platforms is becoming more and more integrated into the way our children learn at school, so we must ensure that we are able to support our children as they learn and not allow a ‘digital divide’ to grow.

We have put together some suggestions to help parents find ways to engage with their children using a balance of “real” experiences and online fun. This allows us to create an environment where our children see that our online tools are just that – tools that can add to an overall experience, but they are not the only experience.

Here are five ways that you can start engaging and having fun with your family, mixing up both online fun and real life fun to make a much more complete experience and create memories to last. By enjoying time together you can make the online experience safer because you are there to guide and monitor your child’s online time.

1. Create a family day trip scrapbook:

Organise a day trip, to the local zoo or fun park, you might like to involve extended family or friends.

Take photographs on the day (make sure you ask for parental permission if you take photos of other children). When you get home, or the next day or so, put aside a couple of hours to play with the kids and create a scrapbook album on your chosen social media platform. You might like to use Pinterest or Facebook.

If you are involving your children we highly recommend keeping the albums private – just for you and your family (you might choose to allow access by extended family). Have your children help you make up titles for the photos but don’t “tag” any of them with names.

Sit with your children and look up information on some of the animal or activities that you did during the day. You could then help your children to make comments on the photos with some of the facts. For example a title on the photo might be Mummy Giraffe and baby. The comment could be: A baby giraffe is called a calf. Giraffes can have necks up to 2 metres long. They have really long tongues too.

You might then look for fun (and age appropriate games to play). For example at Africa games there is a hungry giraffe game and they also have interesting facts about Africa.

2. Go on a real life treasure hunt! Geocaching experiences can be lots of fun!

Ever tried geocaching? Its fun, gets you outdoors and is a great way to show how your smartphone is really just a tool! Did you know that around the world geocaching enthusiasts have been hiding various “treasures” and marking them via GPS for others to find. Little trinkets (stickers, balls, toys from things like kinder surprise) are hidden to find and trade, along with a log book so you can mark when you found it, and leave something else for others to find. There are now over 6 million geocachers worldwide and over 2,214,540 active geocaches (treasure spots) across the world.

All you need is a GPS or an iphone. You can download a geocaching app for around $10 or create an account here and discover what’s hidden in your area (and around the world). A basic account is free, but if you really find you are enjoying it you might choose to join (annually around $30). Find our more here geocaching.com Beginners experiences are marked in green on the site. Check the details as some are more complex than others. Don’t do microcaching to start – they are very tiny and hard to find. Start with the bigger ones.

The only rule is that when you find a cache, whatever you take you replace with something of similar value.

Why not don your pirate gear with the kids and head off on a geocaching adventure!

3. Get APPY!

Hold an APP party where you all compare and talk about the different apps your children are playing with on their mobile devices. This is a great opportunity to talk about safety of apps and to check out just what your kids are playing with online. Take a good look at the types of advertising particularly on free apps and consider whether some apps are “grooming” for future gambling. You might discover some great new apps, and you might find there are some you decide to delete as well. Make sure you discuss with your child the pros and cons and help guide them to make the right decisions about the apps they are using.

4. Paper Chain Family

Here’s a bit of fun. Create some paper chain people or paper dolls and decorate them to represent your family members. Have fun posing them in places like around a tree and take a photo – then take a photo with the actual family doing the same thing. Stay safe, but you can have lots of fun. (add some of the photos to the family scrapbook you created in number 1 above. This is a great opportunity to have a few silly photos taken and then discuss what it might mean to have them online. There are bound to be a few that the kids say “oh yuk, no don’t post that”, and that is exactly what you need to bring a discussion into the space about respecting the rights of others and not posting pictures without their consent.

5. Savvy Shopping skills

With so much of our spending being online and via card, it’s hard for our children to understand that there is not an never ending supply of money. Play “online shopping” but use toy money and see how “savvy” your little budgeters can get. This is a great way to teach your children that money runs out and that prices vary. They will start to understand concepts around making better choices when they can see that the money doesn’t last. If you want to, you could give a small real prize for the one who shows restraint and compares prices (maybe some pocket money or a new money box!).

With more and more of our time being “screen time” it is vital that we seek to educate our children (and ourselves) early in finding balance, not just for on and off screen time, but balance between onscreen play and enjoying family activities offline.

Guiding our children as they grow up online can be tricky for parents. If you have enjoyed this post you may be interested in Futureproof your Kids – a parents guide to the social media playground.

To stay up to date with news for your connected family subscribe to our blog now and watch for our free app coming soon!

We hope you enjoy our suggestions and would love to learn of other ways you use social media to engage effectively with your child. Please let us know in the comments below.

You are most welcome to share this post on your social networks and parent groups. Help to spread the message for safe and balanced social media use.

Fiona Lucas

Fiona Lucas is the founder of iRespectOnline, providing education, training and strategies on managing your online reputation and social media. She is passionate about making the online world a more supportive and happier environment for all. She is the Author of Future Proof your kids.

www.fionalucas.com.au

August 2, 2013 By Fiona Lucas

Censorship or Sensibility?

Why is if that some people see attempts to educate our children in online safety, and to protect them from inappropriate material as censorship?

Personally I valve our freedom of speech highly and I certainly prefer education and self-regulation over legislation. However our most vulnerable, our children need time to develop the skills required to make better, more informed choices, and it does them no favors to force adult behaviors on them from a very young age.

Parents must step up and take responsibility for the things they allow their children to do and see, particularly between the ages of 3-12.

One could I suppose, argue this is censorship, but these are children and,we as the adults have the responsibility to guide them and teach them well,

I do not see educating parents and children in online safety as censorship, in fact I believe it frees them to be able make much better choices. Is it not an oxymoron? To not advocate choice to learn is a type of censorship in itself! True freedom comes from choice ~ to be empowered to choose what is appropriate and what is not. To be empowered with knowledge to make informed choice.

That freedom should extend to not having mass media saturate our children with adult images and behaviours- we are not giving our kids choice now!

There is no harm in teaching our children values and respect. Developing empathy and resilience empowers them to make more informed choices later in life. The harm l believe comes from Not teaching these valves.

Fiona Lucas

www.fionalucas.com.au

July 8, 2013 By Fiona Lucas

What will facebook’s graph search expose?

Facebook started trialling graphsearch in January 2013 with a limited beta rollout. With the help of the feedback from those testing the program, it is now ready to hit the millions of facebook users in facebook land.

First cab off the rank will be those in the USA and with English US language settings, but the rest of the world will not be far behind.

In many ways, graphsearch is really exciting. It will allow you to find services and business close by and help you find long lost friends, lets you search for locations and people in them, depending on the original privacy settings of the posts and profiles. Search is faster, it makes suggestions and links to BING to improve results when you can’t find them on facebook.

This makes is a good opportunity for you to have a really good search of your information and make changes to settings on albums, location check ins and the like before the roll out. Certainly continue to monitor your content after the roll out if you run out of time!

What graph search can do:

Lets you search for people and friends with similar interests (for example people who like a particular artist, musician, film, tv show)
Search for friends in particular locations (useful when travelling)
Search for photographs, for example if you enter “photographs of dogs” you will find photos your friends have posted as well as any public ones.
Search for themes such as films watched by dentists (if occupation is provided on a profile)
SEARCH RESULTS WILL BE DIFFERENT FOR EVERYONE – depending on their privacy settings and the privacy settings of their friends.
Combine any of the above (for example photos of people in New York with dogs)

What it can’t (yet):

Access individual status updates (this one will have some big consequences for some people)
Doesn’t work on mobile apps
It can’t leverage from third party applications such as instagram.

What you should do:

Everyone: Start reviewing your content and “spring clean” your pages. Get some friends together and sort out your facebook privacy. It really helps to have a friend there to check what comes up on a search. You could even make a bit of a party out of it. Have a last laugh before you remove content and tags!

Don’t be afraid to ask someone to untag you or remove photographs. Please ask politely.

Use your activity log (you will find access to your activity log on the right side of your timeline cover pic) to review information.

Parents : You MUST sit down with your children who use facebook and go through this post and the settings together. Have a conversation about just where things might end up. Issues can arise when teens for example have tagged a photo of someone (whether will ill intent or in teen “fun”) with a word like “dog” or “pig” and suddenly a search for pigs or dogs brings up photos of people. On one hand, at least you find them and can take action, on the other hand, there may be serious consequences particularly is inappropriate language or degrogatry terms have been used against a person.

Schools: Review what is being said about the school. In many ways this search is a bonus as it will expose those sites which are not officially run by the school and enable the school a chance to “clean up” and if you don’t already have an official page, then it’s time to “own” the space. iRespectOnline can assist schools in these matters. Please contact us at mail@irespectonline.com .

Businesses: Make sure you and your staff are only posting relevant material to your pages and review for spam. If you haven’t developed an engagement policy for your business, it’s time to! It’s a great time to consider your online reputation and make sure your brand is being portrayed accurately online. If you would like our help, email us at mail@irespectonline.com with your requirements.

Facebook have put together comprehensive instructions and information on graph search, so head over to their page here and start checking out your settings now! Please drop back to let us know your opinion and any concerns you may have with facebook graph search. The background story behind graph search is also pretty interesting, so if you like to know how it came about, this post from The Next Web is informative.
Fiona Lucas

Author Futureproof Your Kids

June 21, 2013 By Fiona Lucas

Reputation repair required or not? Miley Cyrus

After seeing just some of Miley Cyrus’ new video clip I have to wonder what happens to these girls? They must get bullied and pressured for having played a sweet character, or their hearts broken so that they feel they have to show the world (or someone) something. Sadly what they don’t show is any maturity – just a discovery of the use of their body parts to sell. The sad thing is that Miley’s following came from the thousands of little ones who adored her role in Hannah Montana. These little fans helped to “make her” – but then she has turned away with a vengeance.

Why isn’t it ok to be a “nice girl” anymore? The video is a “look at me I can do sex” clip – and I just wonder how she will feel in a few years time when she looks back at it, particularly if she becomes a Mum herself. Why is it necessary to create this “porno style” of clip? Writhing with her backside in the air, demonstrating that she has recently visited her waxer by pulling down the front of her pants and having smoke coming out of places that – well maybe you might find down the alleys in Thailand along with the pingpong balls and sparrows. Seriously I find it tragic because there appears to be a lack of self respect, it is all ego and gloss and so trashy. The girl can sing, but there really are no clean lyrics (as in everything has been digitalised and toyed with). If it’s a coming of age song where she has discovered the lustier part of life, is there any reason for the kind of writhing she does? In some way maybe she is actually taking the Pi** out of these kinds of clips as it is so over the top, but for some reason I don’t really believe that!

As parents we know how much our kids love music, they love dancing and they love to copy moves – but would anyone really be comfortable seeing a group of 8 year olds writhing on the ground and copying these poses? They might not understand right now what it means, but it concerns me that this is how our young people grow up so hung up on how they look.

I’m not a prude, I just don’t see the need for this stuff in every damn clip that comes out. It’s like all these girls with beautiful voices have to outdo each other in the “lets show grandma what good time girls we are” poses. The use of visuals depicting S&M and the kinkier side of life – well that’s fine for adults who know how to deal with it, but young children are being sexualised by these images and I don’t think we are doing our society any favours. (Sexualisation can be defined as: The imposition of adult sexuality on to children and young people before they are capable of dealing with it, mentally, emotionally or physically*). Do we really want to be encouraging our under 10′ and 12’s to be so sexually aware? Childhood is a time of innocence – or so it should be – a time when we are truly free of prejudice and other “stuff” that comes with growing up. There is no need to rush the process surely?

People will say “sex sells”.. but I’d like to think that she could be sexy and sing without looking like a porn star. I’m wondering what’s happening to that industry when more and more of it is becoming mainstream – actually I don’t really want to wonder too much at all!

I really don’t care what you want to look at, but we know that gyms, and doctor studios, waiting rooms and stores play current videos all the time and children are going to see these kinds of film clip, children who haven’t get identified themselves or understood enough about themselves to start comparing and copying these clips. The whole “twerking” which is jerking and jiggling your butt is not done in a fun way – it’s very sexual, and on her facebook site she encourages fans to post vidoes of themselves “twerking”, and in the song, and comments on the site if someone objects to, or doesn’t like the song they are called “haters”. It really makes me sad.

The song is some kind of rebellous ‘we can do what we want” song but it’s hardly original lyrically. Sure you can do what you want (hopefully keeping it legal) – but do you have to do it in front of everyone? Apparently what “we want” is to tongue kiss dolls and rub each others butts whilst having some kind of stimulated orgy?

I despair when I hear of stories of birthday party themes for early teens that rather than be a pyjama party are now “slut parties”! Worse still, stories of children aged 7 & 8 talking about having sex? Dr Joe Tucci from the Australian Childhood foundation was recently quoted as saying “A decade ago we were referred kids as young as seven involved in pulling down pants, now it is penetrative acts, simulated or actual sexual acts and it starts at seven and eight”. You can read the article here.

Where is the integrity in this? What are these “role models” creating in our future generations? Many might say they “are not role models”, but when you are in the public arena, needing that adoring public to be the creators of your income, then I think there is a responsibility that must go with that.

I’d really love to know what you think? Particularly if you have children under 10. If you (or your kids) are adoring Miley fan’s – do you just blindly accept what she does and love it, or do you kind of wonder where she is going with this and why? It’s not knew, Madonna was doing some pretty sexy stuff in the 80’s but we didn’t have pocket access to videos and were lucky if were were playing “pong” on our computers. I think most movie clips were heavily censored before 9pm if they were played at all. Are kids seeing more than they are ready for, has the quality gone down and the “detail” gone up in these clips?

What is your view?

Fiona.

*as defined in a 2010 UK study into the sexualisation of children.

May 28, 2013 By Fiona Lucas

Online superheroes Simple but positive action -: Smile online

As passionate as I am about raising awareness for change in the way we engage online, I had an interesting “comment debate”* on someone’s wall about taking action in the area of online safety and cyberbullying. As someone who is proactive about change and commited to bringing respect, ethics and higher values into the online environment, I was quite interested in their view that my business, my blogs, workshops and my book did not constitute action in this person’s eyes. They spoke about joining organisations to volunteer time on help lines etc as being action.

It is so vital that we do man help lines in order to address the suffering of others, and I certainly hope that the information I share and the openness of my blog and facebook pages offers value for those seeking help, along with the events and organisations that I volunteer time to. In my opinion, my positive action looks beyond helping only those who are already suffering, to include preventing it from happening to others. Therefore I truly feel that educating others, and changing mindsets is very much an action. Would you agree?

The debate however had me thinking about ways of trying to bring positivity into the space. I really hate having to have negative conversations where it feels very ‘doom and gloom’ due to the important issues of safety, because I also feel the online environment can have such a positive effect and be used in ways which are beneficial to others. Some of these benefits include the availability of information, creation of supportive community, help and support during disasters, bringing together those with shared interests, bringing education within the reach of everyone, helping isolated communities to feel more connected, assisting those with disabilities who might otherwise not engage, encouraging us to share our hopes, dream and achievements with others as a way of inspiring those around us – the list goes on. We just don’t highlight the wins enough, but we sure amplify the darker side when it happens.

Some people say to me “I don’t want to share what I had for lunch, or know what you did”, “I dont need people to know where I’ve been or what I did”.. and sure maybe you don’t, but if we go back in time, when communication wasn’t so broad, everyone in the village knew what you had for lunch, what you did, where you had been…. so to me, we have just tried to bring some of the village back, because we have all been wandering around our big lonely cities for quite some time. Just as some wanted to escape the village back in the day, we have those who want to escape back to a time when each of us had more interest in the other, because there simply was a lot less to occupy our minds. With so much now filling our heads, a bit of harmless, no-brainer, “I don’t have to analyse this” posting is quite welcome in my world! Ok some things should stay private – I don’t need to know when you shower or go to the loo (or what you look like in either of those situations) – but if you really want to share that, I would probably ask you why, but then limit the feed. After all it’s your wall, not mine and you can share what you like as long as you take responsibility for it. If you eat out somewhere nice, I am interested – I love eating out and I don’t mind the pics of your food. If you post graphic images of particular causes, that is up to you, but be sensitive to the ages of those you transact online with. Respect our youth’s right to grow up without fear in their faces every minute. Just own what you post. Seriously if you don’t like it, don’t judge it, just adjust your settings if it really bugs you. If its illegal or inappropriate, report the page or post – that’s what I do.

What about though, rather than getting up in arms about people posting pics of the cat, or their outfit, that we choose to view our online experiences with the glass half full? Embrace the simple joy and pleasure that someone is getting from sharing their new hairdo, the new garden spade or their boutique beer. Rather than be annoyed, breathe in the simplicity of their joy and happiness. You don’t have to rush out and get a spade, but hey, if you ever need one you now know which friend can help you!

Naturally there are certain pictures which shouldnt be shared – the ones your grandma would blush at – keep them private. However if you do post about your more intimate thoughts or the melt down you had – recognise that you are reaching out to your community, but also recognise that you must take responsibility for that post – and if you don’t get the response you wanted, either take it down, or learn from it. If its too personal, don’t post it – try picking up the phone and talking things over with a close friend. In the end it is your wall. Try and be understanding, don’t knock the guy who posts pictures of his new mag wheels when you have just finished posting 300 pictures of baby eating yoghurt – one is his baby the other is yours!

If you only use your social media for business, then stop and realise that platforms like facebook and blogging itself have grown as social networks and blogging is about sharing opinion, thoughts and events of the day – hundreds and thousands of global diaries being updated every minute. Logically not all content will resonnate with our own values and opinions, but if you let it wash over you, you might just find that you are learning new things. We need to keep the social in social media or we go back to square one, and I think many in the world are over the bombardment of advertising everywhere they go.

This post was inspired because I was seeking interaction on how to bring positives, love and fun into the space, to counteract some of the negativity. I was shocked to find that some people, particularly young people, just don’t know how to give a compliment or praise someone. It’s not, to coin a phrase “wanky” to tell others positive things – it’s just simply nice!

So how can we take simple postive action? Well how about joining up with our new global event? Until the end of June we challenge you to join us and to post a positive comment on someones wall, then share the comment (without the persons name) so that others can see the types of things that people appreciate in others. #LET’SSMILEONLINE is a really simple way to spread a little love. I think our kids would be more resilient and able to cope with the odd nasty comment from a bully when (1) they can recognise that the issue is with the person posting, not them (2) they see positives to counteract the negatives. It’s not rocket science, it’s not even science, it’s just something I would love your support in trying. Let’s all be online superheroes. If you see something negative, just remove it, or let us know if it’s on our event and we will remove it. No need to engage because who wants to waste energy on negativity anyway?

fiona lucas

*comment debate: my term for a lengthy thread on facebook

*illustrations from Futureproof your Kids