By the time you learn something new or a new website on the Internet, you could be sure that your child has already started using it or may have moved to the next. Arena of social networking is spreading from Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Facebook to Twitter and they are getting covering our personal, professional to family lives. Mention of family brings up the significant members of family – the kids. By the time you have learnt everything to monitor and protect kids at the Facebook, they may have moved to the Twitter. Hence, you need to know everything about Twitter – how risky or safe it can be for your kids. Everything about the social network is not unsafe or evil about the Twitter. There are lots of ways Twitter can help your kids enhance their skill or could be educational for your kids as well.
Who kids follow at the Twitter?
It is a widespread notion and much debated that 80 percent of members use Twitter for professional, marketing or business purposes – does it put your kids off from using Twitter? But, if you closely follow the trend of Tweeting you will notice celebrities are most frequent to tweet and welcome people to follow them. You may figure out that your kids are following Twilight, Kristen Sewart and Robert Pattinson, Harry Potter, Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus etc. When Miley Cyrus gave up Twitter she reportedly had two million followers – your kid could likely be one of them as most of those followers were teens and kids. Now more young people are joining Twitter these days to get access to links to their interest based websites. You may have concerns for Facebook, but it has a close-knit safety measures in place. Your kids can filter out who can see their Facebook Wall posts, pictures, videos or links posted by them. At Twitter, they cannot filter any further than filtering malicious users through “Protect Your Tweets” that narrow down the people whom you approve to see your updates. Otherwise, your kids’ posts are visible to all. Apart from the security measures, there are ways Twitter can educate your children.
Can Twitter educate your children?
Though you may think that your teen uses Twitter as a media to reach out to Ashton Kutcher, but Twitter could give him/her access to important people who could positively influence your kids’ and shape their career. There are journalists or professionals from across various spectrums that students can follow them and their updates, navigate to their blogs, links and studies.
Moreover, Twitter can mold or enhance your kids’ writing ability. Twitter allows lesser space for creating your ‘Bio’ within 60 characters while they narrow the space for status updates to 140 characters. Thus, students will be able to articulate their views and themselves in more precise and concise manner. They will have to revise and curtail words repeatedly while writing on Twitter thus forming habit of revising and rewriting to perfect their write ups. They will also learn how every letter and word counts to write concise copy. Also, professors and teachers are integrating lesson plans to their Twitter profile, also tweets to update and answer to questions etc.
You have posted a good topic. Really we should think on use of tweeter.I think should keep an eye about their followers and tweeting else we can’t stop them to tweet. There was no harm if they follow good persons. It’ll enriched their knowledge. Here is also a good solutions for children.
Twitter can be educational and safe for kids if used responsibly. Every user should take social networking sites into moderation. Thank you,