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In the book The Spyglass, children’s author Richard Paul Evans describes a kingdom that has fallen into disrepair and apathy.1 Crops were planted and then failed, houses were built and then neglected, people were impoverished and dispirited. One day a traveler arrives at the crumbling palace to meet with the king. The traveler explains that he has an enchanted spyglass. Anyone who looks through the spyglass is able to see things not as they are but as they could be. With the help of the enchanted spyglass, the king begins to see potential in every part of his dilapidated kingdom in ways he never had imagined before. Ignited by this new hope, the king inspires his subjects to work alongside him to build a beautiful land, because he knows what the kingdom has the potential to become. As the book ends, the reader sees that the kingdom is repaired and thriving; it has become the vision shown by the spyglass.
Engaged digital citizens view technology like the spyglass; it is a tool that we can use to help make the communities we live in—both digital and physical—reach a higher potential. In chapter 3, we learned about the difference between active and passive tech use. Passive tech users see technology as a tool to consume information and entertain themselves, whereas active tech users view technology, like the spyglass, as a tool to help improve the world around them. The simple mindset shift in viewing our devices as tools for doing good is the defining characteristic of engaged digital citizens.
Young Voices Matter
The first step for creating engaged digital citizens is making sure we’re teaching young people that their contributions and opinions matter. I think deep down we all believe this and want it to be true. But there are many elements of our society that are set up to communicate the opposite message. Much of school is designed in a way that tells our kids that they are to apply the skills they are learning some day in their hypothetical future, not now. They are taught to learn math because they will need it to get into college. They are taught to write because it will be an important skill when they get a job. In history, the people they learn about are always adults, not kids. They have little choice or control over the learning experience itself; they are handed a schedule, given assignments (that they didn’t have any input in designing), and told to complete them by a date that they didn’t choose. The message that young voices don’t matter is reinforced by the fact that they can’t vote until they are eighteen. One of the most important tenets of democracy is the idea that everyone has a voice. We teach that to our children, yet we offer very few ways to actually use that voice before they’re no longer kids. Fortunately, the digital world gives a wide set of tools that can help change that narrative. These tools allow youth to have a voice and learn how to make a meaningful impact on their community, family, and in some cases, the world as a whole—right now, not decades down the road.
Just Some Students from Florida
In February 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was in the news worldwide when nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz entered the school with a semiautomatic rifle, killing seventeen people and injuring seventeen others. This horrific event became one of the deadliest school shootings in US history. Yet there was a unique ending to this tragic story that set it apart for another reason. In other school shootings, traditional news media and political leaders quickly shape the national conversation around the event. A narrative emerges around what actually happened, with speculation about the causes, who is to blame, and the political responses to justify action (or lack thereof). But in the case of Parkland, it was the students who shaped the national conversation. Frustrated about viewpoints and conclusions from adults that they did not share or agree with, they used their access to social media to reset and redirect the conversation into what has now become one of the most powerful examples of youth engagement ever seen. Within a week of the shooting, the students had appeared on nearly every major news program and had raised more than $3 million in donations to support their cause. Emma Gonzáles, one of the most recognizable faces of the movement, has over 1.5 million Twitter followers—about twice as many as the National Rifle Association.2
Not long after the shooting, I met Diane Wolk-Rogers, a history teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. As she explained, nobody could have prepared these students for the horror they faced on that day. But they had been prepared to know how to use technology to make their voices heard. Wolk-Rogers says, “They are armed with incredible communication skills and a sense of citizenship that I find so inspiring.” So when it was time to act, they knew the tools of the trade.
Engaged digital citizens know how to use technology to identify and propose solutions and promote action around causes that are important to them and their communities.3 Micro-activism is a term used to describe small-scale efforts that, when combined, can bring about significant change. While young people might not be able to vote or run for office, they have a whole range of micro-activism opportunities—all made possible by their participation in the digital world. For youth who have access to social media, micro-activism can be as simple as using their digital platforms to call awareness to issues that matter to them—eradicating racism, protecting our planet, or funding their school, and so on. Most states have a function on their website to submit ideas or feedback directly to the office of the governor. Through sites like Change.org anyone, regardless of age, can submit suggestions to political leaders or private sector entities. You can also add your name in support of other petitions that are gaining momentum. There are many compelling stories of youth who have used Change.org to call attention to issues that matter to them. Examples include a ten-year-old who used the platform to convince Jamba Juice to switch from Styrofoam cups to a more environmentally friendly alternative. Or a seventh grader who used Change.org to successfully petition the Motion Picture Association to change the rating on a movie about school bullying so students in her junior high would be allowed to see it.4
Not all acts of micro-activism will immediately result in a desired change. But regardless of the outcome, learning how to impact community issues using digital tools is an important skill to develop in and of itself. The ability to motivate others to act for good in a virtual space will be a significant (if not the significant) determining factor in the effectiveness of future civic leaders. Young people need to practice using tech to make a difference now, if they are going to be prepared to lead our society when they grow up.
Identifying Opportunities to Engage
A prerequisite for helping our kids become engaged digital citizens is modeling opportunities where we ourselves can use our access to the digital world to make a difference. In the physical world, I do this with my kids when I see a piece of trash on the ground at the park. I look for this opportunity because it gives me the chance to teach that even though it isn’t our trash, we can make a shared place a little better by throwing it away. My hope is that modeling this action will help my kids apply that principle in circumstances far beyond cleaning a park. We need to do the same type of modeling in the virtual world. You are likely already using technology to make your community better, but to an outside observer (our kids), that’s not as evident as picking up a piece of trash (Dad’s just on his laptop again). Unless we are transparent about how we’re using technology to be engaged digital citizens, the opportunity for modeling is lost. This can be as simple as saying “I’ll be right there, I’m just posting information on Nextdoor about the blood drive at church next week.” Or “I’m sending a message asking Chris if he needs anything because his wife was in the hospital. Do you want to see what I wrote?”
This means, of course, that we first have to actually be using technology to engage with our community ourselves. Several years ago, the Stanford d.school created a program to teach people how to be change makers in their communities.5 The first step of that program was developing a “bias to action” mindset. The concept was that we could learn more and make a greater impact by just starting to do good things rather than by spending a long time analyzing or overthinking our approach. As with the piece of trash on the playground, we didn’t need to do a study or write up an action plan; we just identified a need and immediately took a small but meaningful action. What might a bias-to-action mindset look like in the digital world? It might be noticing that a local food bank you follow on Facebook needs donations and posting a message online encouraging your followers to join you in contributing. It might be posting how you responded in a situation where you observed a racist or discriminatory act, to encourage others to do the same. When being engaged digital citizens, we should paraphrase a line from our friends at the Department of Homeland Security: “If you see something, [do] something.”
In addition to modeling digital engagement, we should also expose our children to situations where they can discover their own opportunities to help. A fun approach to helping young kids become engaged digital citizens comes from Mary Jalland, a kindergarten teacher at Westquarter Primary School in Falkirk, Scotland. Her class has a pet (stuffed) elephant, Blue Ellie, that travels around to physical and digital communities and shares what she’s “seeing” with the children. Through this process, they learn about communities they haven’t visited and increase their awareness of important social issues.6 On one trip, Blue Ellie shared the challenges of living in a part of the world that lacked proper sanitation infrastructure. The kindergartners practiced being engaged digital citizens by deciding how they could use digital tools to help do something about this problem. In this particular case, they created a video explaining how diseases can spread when sanitary toilets are not available and highlighting nongovernmental organizations that are working to bring sanitary water to more people.7 In their video, they encouraged others to participate in toilet twinning, a movement to buy a “twin” for each toilet in your house that can be given to someone in an underserved community.8
There are countless ways for young people to use technology to be engaged digital citizens. Let’s consider examples of three different types of digital engagement. First, we will look at crowdsourcing—joining forces with large numbers of people to make a outsized impact. Second, we will look at ways for youth to use tech to directly engage and serve in local communities, including their most important local community—their own family. And finally, we will look at using coding as a tool to develop new solutions to important problems.
Crowdsourcing Tough Problems
One of the powers of the digital world is that it allows us to join forces with others to make a difference in a problem that is simply too complex to solve on our own. Known as crowdsourcing, this approach can be an easy way to become part of a broad community of engaged digital citizens. Crowdsourcing makes sense for addressing problems that either are very difficult (e.g., curing cancer, slowing climate change, or stopping human trafficking) or simply exist on a large scale (e.g., fixing all of the cracks in city sidewalks that make them inaccessible to someone with a wheelchair). Here are some examples of crowdsourced solutions.
Transcribing History
Digital tools can give us unprecedented access to learn about important moments in our history as a human race or even the history of our individual families. However, for this to happen, the information must be available in a digital format. Many of the records of our history are still stored in paper notebooks, as artifacts in museums, or on gravestones and other physical landmarks that are not searchable. Indexing projects are a form of crowdsourcing that allow people worldwide to digitize important historical artifacts to make them searchable and discoverable online. These projects work by presenting an image of a historical record through an app and asking users to take a few minutes to type the descriptions of the records into a searchable database. Generally, the same record is given to multiple people to help catch and correct errors. The Smithsonian Institution has used this approach to digitize the descriptions of millions of physical artifacts in its collections (see transcription.si.edu). Using this same approach, Ancestry.com’s world archives project asks engaged digital citizens to move important historical data, like immigration records or marriage certificates, into the digital world. Find A Grave crowdsources taking pictures of cemetery headstones so people can find where their ancestors were buried. With a little bit of supervision, taking pictures or scanning records is an easy way for a young person to join in the process of digitizing history.
Helping the Blind to See
Crowdsourcing can be used to serve other members of our physical and digital communities. Be My Eyes is an app that allows engaged digital citizens to make the world more accessible to people who are blind or have a low level of vision. The idea was developed by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a Danish furniture craftsman, who is visually impaired himself. When a blind friend told him that he used video calls to connect with family and friends who could help him with tasks he couldn’t complete on his own, Wiberg got the idea for Be My Eyes. He decided to crowdsource the use of video technology to assist blind or low-vision individuals. The app connects a network of sighted volunteers to people with visual impairments through their mobile devices. If a blind person needs help with a particular task, say, reading the expiration date on a carton of milk or reading a phone number, they can connect with a sighted person through the app to have it read to them. Over 2 million volunteers are already participating in over 150 countries in over 180 languages to help people who are blind or have a low level of vision.9
Curbing Human Trafficking
The International Labor Organization estimates that over 40 million people globally are trafficked illegally and against their will.10 To put that into perspective, that’s about the population of the entire state of California. The problem has continued to elude law enforcement, as traffickers are careful to post pictures advertising their victims’ services in virtual spaces where anonymity allows these acts to continue. TraffickCam is an initiative to use technology to crowdsource a solution. The request for digital citizens is simple: every time they stay in a hotel room, they take a picture of the room and upload it to TraffickCam’s database.11 Using artificial intelligence, unique elements of the rooms are identified (the pattern of the curtains, the distance between the TV and the wall, the color of the carpet, etc.). This creates a unique digital fingerprint of each room. These elements are then matched to the backgrounds of pictures posted on human trafficking sites. By comparing the unique elements of the images with the TraffickCam database, law enforcement officers can pinpoint hotels—even specific rooms—that are used by people who are being illegally trafficked. Your older teen could help in these efforts by snapping a few pictures of a hotel on their next vacation or school field trip.
Curing Disease
A final example of crowdsourcing can be seen in the fight to cure cancer. To understand how this works, it helps to dust off a bit of what we learned in high school about proteins. Proteins carry out a huge variety of jobs, including supporting a cell’s structure, creating energy, sending messages, and repairing damaged DNA.12 They are also part of diseases like Covid-19, AIDS, and cancer. What role protein will play is determined by its shape. Knowing how proteins are shaped or folded not only helps us figure out what a particular protein does, but also gives us a recipe book for creating new proteins that can be designed to combat our most serious illnesses. Because of the enormous variability in the way proteins can fold, identifying the many possible shapes had long been regarded as one of the hardest problems in science. But now, using a crowdsourced game called Foldit, people can compete with each other to identify new variations in the shape of proteins. Players get points every time they identify a new folding pattern, but the winner is science. Creating vaccines and even potential cures for diseases has been dramatically accelerated by more than two hundred thousand people worldwide who work together to supercharge the decoding. In one case, Foldit players helped identify the structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) that causes AIDS-like symptoms. This scientific problem had been unsolved for fifteen years, yet in ten days, Foldit players working together produced a 3D model of the enzyme that was accurate enough for molecular replacement.13
Serving in Their Communities
Some of the most important contributions young people can make come from opportunities to serve in their local communities. Let’s look at some ways to use technology to mentor, serve, and encourage others to take action as well.
Being a Virtual Force for Good
Young people can use technology to encourage those around them to make better choices. This can be as simple as sharing inspirational thoughts and ideas to highlighting important causes via online channels—perhaps alerting friends to programs like No One Eats Alone or to participate in an antiracism demonstration. Awareness of ALS disease became greater when social media users helped the ice bucket challenge go viral in 2016. That online challenge generated an estimated $220 million for research and support of ALS.
Being a force for good can also be about shining the spotlight on other people whose voices need to be heard. In the summer of 2020 during the protests against racism in the US, social media users highlighted African American voices by retweeting and reposting their stories and by muting unrelated posts so they didn’t stifle voices that needed to be heard. The things young people choose to stand for through their virtual presence, especially when combined with invitations to act, can amplify their impact in their communities.
Remote Reading Buddies
Several years ago, Eric Turner was working at an alternative school for fourth- to twelfth-grade students outside of Nashville. His students were serving time for issues of misconduct and were required to meet a certain number of service hours. Kory Graham was a kindergarten teacher in rural Dodge Center, Minnesota. Like all kindergarten teachers, she felt the pressure of making sure a bunch of hyper six-year-olds got enough reading practice, knowing that reading is a foundational skill that the rest of their academic success would depend on. Reading had to be fun. Turner and Graham hatched an idea for a digital service activity. Once a week, Turner’s high school students would read to Graham’s kindergartners via video chat. Turner’s kids would prepare two books, and the kindergartners would choose which one they wanted to hear (though often they got to read both). This activity gave Turner’s students a reason to practice reading, something many struggled with, and to experience the responsibility of being role models to younger kids who looked up to them, something the students had never felt before.
Turner recalls, “The students that read came out glowing—you could see the effect on them.” The experience was similar for the kindergartners, too. “It was pure magic,” Graham explains. “They felt so special that high school kids would take the time to read to them. I have goosebumps just thinking about it.”14 Turner remembers that one of his students was struggling to learn to speak English. Reading to the kindergartners became a new motivation for him to work on his language. He would practice and practice to make sure he could read the story well enough that the children could understand him.
Both teachers quickly realized that the benefits of this activity went far beyond literacy skills. Graham’s students, living in a predominantly white community, had an opportunity to interact with Turner’s diverse group of students, gaining an appreciation for people from different backgrounds. “We may have been reading to kindergartners, but we were also able to make friends with people who didn’t look like us.” And for Turner’s students, technology provided an opportunity to serve and experience the positive feedback of contributing to other members of the community.
Connecting with Your Neighborhood
The digital world can be a great platform for strengthening connections to a young person’s neighborhood community as well. In a world where we often don’t know our neighbors’ names, apps like Nextdoor help create a stronger feeling of community. A friend recently shared with me that a family in her neighborhood created an online newspaper produced by kids digitally as a way to keep in touch during the Covid-19 pandemic and as a way to make it more fun for kids to do their distance-learning writing assignments. Sites like JustServe.org also help us connect with members of our local community through service opportunities.
We can think creatively about ways to engage with our neighborhood community. Start by asking your kids what issues they want to help with, whether it’s cleaning up the neighborhood, helping a local charity, or even spreading cheer in tough times. Technology can help connect their interests with opportunities to engage with others in your local community. And we can always use our digital presence to amplify important local events and causes via social media. Get your kids involved. They might surprise you with what they come up with.
Strengthening Family Relationships
Of all the communities our children participate in, their family is likely the most important of all. Engaged digital citizens know how to use their access to the digital world to deepen and strengthen ties to members of their families. As parents, we can model the use of digital tools for strengthening family relationships. You might try the following ideas in your own home.
Digital Family Councils
Members of my extended family are geographically dispersed across the country and might get to see each other in person only once a year. To strengthen family relationships, our family has established a tradition of holding monthly digital family councils. During a family council, everyone logs into Zoom; each family takes turns hosting. We start with a quick update on everyone and share accomplishments that have happened in that month. We talk about upcoming family events and challenges we may be facing so we can be aware of opportunities to help each other. Sometimes we have a parents-only family council to talk about issues that may not be appropriate for the kids to participate in (like advice on supporting a family member that is struggling). But even in those cases, we tell our kids that we’re having a family council, so they learn the concept of using the virtual world to build family connections. In addition to the monthly family councils, we also use a family text thread and apps like Marco Polo to stay connected to each other. Technology is a powerful tool to strengthen and close the distance between physically dispersed families.
Capturing Family Experiences
One of my favorite ways for young people to practice being engaged digital citizens is by helping capture important family moments. When we take a family trip or celebrate a holiday, our kids can take the responsibility to preserve those memories. With a high-quality camera on almost every mobile device, children have the tools at their fingertips to be videographers and photographers. Younger children can borrow a parent’s phone if they don’t have their own device yet. In our family, the expectation of capturing family experiences is included as part of our children’s device-use agreements. Free video- and photo-editing apps can turn photo and video collections into lasting stories. Beyond capturing photos and video, in our family we also have a tradition of recording funny moments. When a family member says or does something particularly funny, whoever was with them at the time writes down what happened on a shared notes app. At the end of the year, we create a “best of” collection of funny moments that we share with our family and friends. There are many special family memories that would have been lost if our kids had not taken on the responsibility of using their technology to capture these moments.
Preserving Family Stories
Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor and director of Emory University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, studies the surprisingly important role that family stories play in young people’s lives. Her research shows that sharing family stories contributes to kids’ emerging sense of self, both as an individual and as a member of their family. She says family stories teach children a sense of belonging. They provide a script for life, and a set of values and guideposts.15 In her research, Fivush found that adolescents who can recount details of family stories have higher self-esteem and greater resilience. She found that young people use stories told by parents to understand things about themselves. In one example, a teenager recalled a story about his mother standing up to a bully on behalf of another child. He ended the story saying, “That’s why I always speak up for myself. Because my mother was so brave to do that.” Through a family story, this teenager was learning something important about what type of person his mother is as well as an important moral lesson about the world.16
Technology enables kids to develop a deeper connection to their families while commemorating family history. Several years ago, we came up with a series of questions to ask our children’s great-grandparents (see “Starter Questions for Family History Interviews”) and recorded the audio of the interviews. These recordings preserve the stories of their great-grandparents and allow family members to continue to hear voices of relatives who have passed away. Sites like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org are tools who can help tell a family’s story by allowing kids to see who the earliest members of their family were, where they came from, and who else they are related to. Working together with my kids, we’ve learned about hundreds of our ancestors and found records showing when my Grandpa Sal came to the United States and even a picture of the boat he traveled on. As kids use digital tools to preserve the history of their families, they learn that they are part of something bigger than themselves, which provides a stronger foundation when challenges arise.
Starter Questions for Family History Interviews
We used the following questions for interviews with our children’s great-grandparents. You can use them as a basis for capturing your own family stories or create your own list. You can record stories in person or via apps like Zoom. There are hundreds of audio and video editing apps to help create the final product.
· What was your weirdest job?
· What was your most embarrassing moment?
· How did you meet Grandma/Grandpa?
· What’s your favorite thing about Grandma/Grandpa?
· Who were your role models when you were a kid?
· What was life like growing up in your home?
· What’s your favorite place that you’ve traveled to?
· Who was your best friend in school?
· What did you think you would be when you grew up?
· Did you serve in the military? If so, what did you do?
· Do you have any regrets looking back on your life?
· What’s a tough decision you had to make and how did you decide?
· What are some important world events that took place in your lifetime?
Coding: The Language of Problem-Solving
Up to this point, we have explored ways to use our access to the digital world to amplify voices of young people and join together to improve our global, local, and family communities. But there is one more skill that we might consider in order to prepare our kids to be successful digital citizens. We need to teach them the language of problem-solving in the digital world: coding. When I served as the chief innovation officer for Rhode Island, we set a goal to be the first state in the country to teach computer science in every school. The initiative received national attention for the community-based approach that led to meeting our goal in under eighteen months (record time for a significant change in public education). But the more important part of the story was the why behind the goal. Why would it be a top priority for a small New England state to make sure all children had the opportunity to learn to code, even if they had no interest in a future tech career?
Think for a moment about some of the challenges we face in our global community, both now and in the future. We need the ability to design and manufacture vaccines at a fast rate. We need to make education more accessible. We need a whole host of solutions to address environmental dangers that threaten our future on this planet. We need finance and banking solutions for areas of the world with limited infrastructure. We need new business opportunities to make sure the next generation of workers is prepared for the jobs of the future. The list, of course, goes on and on. Our issues and challenges are varied and complex. But the one constant across all these problems is that the solutions will be, in large part, found in computer code. Coding is the language of future problem-solving. States and countries that focus on teaching computational thinking will be the ones that have the greater capability to solve our future problems. Those that don’t will find themselves increasingly dependent on others to do so.
As we teach the language of digital problem-solving, we need to include young people who may not immediately see value in learning to code. Traditional coding camps or school computer science classes have not had a great track record when it comes to including girls or African American and Latino youth. A research team at the University of Washington explored how uninviting computer science classrooms are and what can be done to make them better. It turns out, just removing some of the Star Wars posters from the walls and adding a few plants can make a surprising difference in making the space feel more welcoming. But most importantly, school guidance counselors and parents need to understand that learning to code isn’t a skill reserved for geeky boys who want to go into computer programming jobs, but for all engaged digital citizens. If we only teach coding to a limited group of people, we will have dramatically limited our future problem-solving capabilities.
Around the world, engaged young people are already designing apps for tackling major challenges in their communities. Brittany Wenger was seventeen years old when she decided to teach a computer to diagnose brain cancer.17 Saaket Jajodia and his brother, Salil, built an app to help their peers donate their time to good causes in their neighborhood in Bangalore.18 When David Suhkin was in sixth grade, he built an app that would help predict the likelihood of a snow day being called the next day—hey, if you’re a student, this is an important problem that needs to be solved.19
I recently visited Calipso High School in Cali, Colombia. The school is located in a socioeconomically challenged region and operates with very limited resources. But the principal, Alverio Velasco, understood the importance of preparing his students to be engaged digital citizens. He prioritized teaching computer science, not in an abstract way, but with the goal of helping students use tech to make the world around them better. During my visit, a group of students showed me a program they had designed to make public transportation safer through motion-detecting lighting at bus stops. Another student showed me an operating robotic hand he had designed and 3D-printed. He told me he designed the hand to help someone who had lost the physical ability to pick things up. The code for these projects was just a prototype, but the understanding that the students at Calipso were gaining about using code as a tool to improve their communities was very real.
Learning to Code and Hackathons
Of course, most young people don’t figure out how to teach a computer to diagnose cancer while they’re still in high school. The real breakthroughs will likely come as they work together throughout their lives with other engaged digital citizens who also speak the shared language of digital problem-solving. But for that to happen, we need to prepare them with the basic skills now. Talk to your children’s school counselors about what computer science classes are offered in their school. Apps like Lightbot, Scratch, or Tynker all teach coding in fun ways to get younger kids started with coding at home. Code.org’s Hour of Code encourages kids to change the world through a variety of online coding activities. Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code are programs that offers coding experiences for girls worldwide.
For older children who already have an understanding of the basics of coding, a great way to start to practice using tech for good is by participating in computer problem-solving competitions known as hackathons. Hackathons are team challenges where students compete to use technology to solve a variety of problems in a short time (usually over a weekend). When I worked for President Obama, we hosted hackathons at the White House to look at issues ranging from designing tools to make it easier for first-generation college students to plan for college to helping families get easier access to their digital health-care records. In Rhode Island, instead of creating a single public transportation app, we provided access to a data feed with real-time locations of our city buses and invited developers, including student teams, to build apps to help Rhode Islanders more effectively navigate the public transportation system. The COVID-19 Global Hackathon had participants from 175 countries working together to tackle challenges related to the coronavirus pandemic. There is even a National Day of Civic Hacking sponsored by Code for America.20 Searching on hackclub.com or blackgirlscode.com will show you hackathon and coding clubs that are happening in your region.
In summary, our kids are surrounded by innumerable opportunities to make their world a better place. They don’t have to wait until they are older to begin to have an impact on the people around them. Fortunately, they have access to a more powerful tool set for community engagement than any generation before them. As parents, it’s our job to help our children become comfortable making the connection between opportunities to be forces for good in their communities and the digital tools to help them do so. This is just as important when it comes to strengthening and connecting our families. In a virtual world, problems are solved in lines of code by people who know how to speak the language. As our children begin to understand the power of their digital devices to improve their virtual and physical spaces, they are also practicing the skills they need to become our future global leaders.
Next Steps
Action Items
· Model the use of technology to participate in micro-activism or crowdsourced problem-solving, and involve your children where appropriate.
· Brainstorm with your family about ways they can help their community by using social platforms and technology, including highlighting important causes or events.
· Create the habit of regular digital family interactions such as family councils or chats with faraway relatives (read books together, learn or teach a new skill, play a game, etc.).
· Talk to your school about coding programs that are offered. With your child, select a fun app, online program, or community group that teaches coding.
· Consider adding a few service-oriented digital activities as part of your device-use agreement.
· Search for famous people you may be related to by using FamilySearch.org’s famous relative Finder.
· Work with your kids to use technology to capture important family moments or stories.
Conversation Starters
· What is something you could do to help make the world around you a better place to live?
· Have you ever found an opportunity to help another person online?
· If you could solve one problem at your school, what would it be?
· How could you use technology to help you solve that problem?
· If you could invent a new app that would make the world better, what would it do?
· How can you help capture and preserve family experiences and stories?