New website teaches teens about safe texting – will it work?
A new website called textEd will be introduced to hundreds of grade 7 students across Canada today with the purpose of teaching teens about safe texting.
As a parent of a tween or teen, I’m sure you’ve already heard about sexting and the dangers associated with this alarmingly popular activity amongst teens. A charitable organization called the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has come together with Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association to create a website which teaches kids the importance of safe texting. You can read more about it here.
You can check out the textED website here. For all you parents out there who have a difficult time keeping up with the texting/IM lingo, the website also has an Acronictionary, which teaches you what all those acronyms, such as AAK, SETE, or XYZ mean. HTH!
Do you think educating our youth in such a way will help? Looking at the site, do you think it would be something your teen would spend the time looking at? How do you feel about it being presented in our schools?
Filed Under: For Kids > Tech Trends
Tags: new website, safe texting, sexting, sexting teens, textED
I don’t know if teens will use it, but it could be a good resource for parents who never text. However the acronictionary needs to be beefed up. Even popular and benign acronyms like FTW (for the win) aren’t included, never mind the more suggestive ones. If parents are hoping to decode their kids’ messages, they’ll need to know the bad and the ugly as well as the good. Otherwise why would any teen need to text “POS” (parent over shoulder – another omission from the list)?
Parents, if you want to really know what’s going on, checkout Marc’s post from 2007 on 20 IM messages that parents need to know.
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These phrases (in the acronictionary) are rarely used anyway. I don’t see use for anything except LOL, OMG and similar popular acronyms. And I’m a teen. I’m wondering if these are based off actual messages or just made up for the sake of being there.
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Seriously not even kid in Grade 7 has a phone, or even participates in this… Most likely if kids are doing this already they won’t listen to any of this.
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