BCDS offers tech rules for parents

Laptops in the classroom are here to stay and with evolving technology come new challenges for parents. To help parents navigate through this brave new world, Bi-Cultural Day School hosted a Middle School Parent Technology Workshop, led by Bud Freund, owner of API, a tech support services company. He also teaches technology classes at BCDS.

“Our job as parents has changed,” said Freund. Parents need to be educated to supervise their children online. He calls parents “digital immigrants,” having grown up with VCRs and rotary phones, while their children are “digital natives,” who are being raised on Smartphones, tablets and digital TV.

“It’s different than when I went to school. There’s a whole new set of rules that need to be created so that our kids are safe online, respectful and making the best use of the technology they have,” said Cheryl Bader, mother of eighth-grader Danny Goldblum.

All BCDS middle school students are required to use laptops, which offer opportunities for research, filmmaking and connecting with Israeli classes, as well as learning common computer programs, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel, all of which are used extensively in higher education and the business world.

Freund recommends that parents focus on three general areas when thinking about technology.

“The first key theme is empowerment. Laptops are enormously powerful tools. Most people don’t realize that they give a machine to their kids that’s capable of creating Angry Birds or Stuxnet, the virus that shut down the Iranian nuclear program. With power, comes responsibilities,” said Freund. “The second theme is practicing good citizenship. For example, downloading images, movies or music from file-sharing web sites is theft, and you don’t bully.”

The third area is boundaries. Freund says that since he pays for his children’s devices, he makes the rules about filters to block websites or phone numbers that he finds objectionable. That includes a “no-games until homework is done” rule.

“That is under my control as a parent,” he said. “Parents need to partner with their children and their schools.”

Freund said that people should remember that “everything is traceable. Parents need to explain to their kids that you can’t hide what you’re doing on the computer.”

It also means stepping in to avoid a potentially embarrassing situation. He relates a story about a mother who collected everyone’s cell phone at a sleepover. She said it was in case a parent called early in the morning, but it was really because one child occasionally still sucks his thumb and she didn’t want a cell phone photo snapped and the image posted to Facebook.

And that leads to Freund’s next hard-and-fast rule: No negative speech online. “It lasts forever. If you don’t want it on the front page of the New York Times, you don’t want to post it online,” he said.

While he said it can feel overwhelming for parents sometimes, “You’re not alone. We are all in this together and we are all learning as we go.”