What do kids get up to online?
Photo by Andras Vas on Unsplash
It’s Safer Internet Day tomorrow (5th February 2019). Here are some reports you may find useful:
Hopes and Streams
This is a recent report from the LGfL (which used to be the London Grid for Learning but which now apparently covers a much wider area than that).
There are some interesting stats. For example, 81% of those who met an online friend in person took or told someone else. Which presumably means that 9% didn't, which is concerning. Even that 81% figure isn't wonderful. I mean, for example, who did they tell or take along?
Children's Media Lives
This is another survey into what children in the UK do online, specifically in relation to media, such as television and social media. This was published very recently, and also includes some interesting findings, such as:
"... children were not posting status updates or pictures as often as they had in previous waves, with most keeping self-generated content on their profiles to a minimum. Children who did post on their profiles were generally re-posting content from others, as opposed to generating original content themselves."
USA teens' use of social media
You have to subscribe to get the full report, but it's worth doing so because it's quite interesting. This is not least because teenagers in the USA seem to view social media quite positively on the whole, despite being aware that tech companies "manipulate" people to spend more time on their devices.
"More than one in four teens (27 percent) say social media is “extremely” or “very” important to them for expressing themselves creatively. Using social media for creative expression appears to be especially important to the most vulnerable teen social media users—those lowest on the scale of social-emotional well-being. Thirty-seven percent of those teens say social media is “extremely” or “very” important to them for that purpose, compared to 21 percent of teen social media users who are high in social-emotional well-being. For example, in open-ended responses to the survey, one 17-year-old white girl wrote that one of the benefits of social media is that she can “get my artwork out to the public”; a 14-year-old African American girl wrote that “[s]ocial media allows me to have a creative outlet to express myself”; a 14-year-old white boy said he likes social media because “I get to share things that I make”; and a 16-year-old Hispanic/Latino boy wrote that he likes using social media because “I get to post my costume and design work"
USA teen’s use of social media
Other interesting websites
EU Kids Online Reports
For example: Are kids digital natives or naive experts?
Global Kids Online
Reports from other countries, including Uruguay, Brazil and Ghana, with research in Canada, New Zealand and the Philippines currently under way.
This article first appeared in the Digital Education newsletter.