Courtney Keleher, mother to three boys, knows how challenging it can be to keep up with kids on the internet. Her oldest, 11, is already pretty savvy. Her 8-year-old is right behind him, and both of those brothers are doing things that her 5-year-old is picking up on.
“I would like to be as efficient as my kids when it comes to searching or being on the web,” Keleher said. “They are figuring stuff out pretty quickly, and everything they do is online nowadays. As a parent, I don’t have the time to just sit there and learn it all on my own, so having a quick overview of how I can use a tool is helpful.”
As a member of the Pershing Elementary PTA, Keleher helped seek out a grant from Google to do exactly that.
The National Parent Teacher Association has awarded the Pershing group a $1,250 grant to run “Be Internet Awesome,” a program developed with the corporate owner of Google and YouTube to help parents protect their children while using its ubiquitous suite of apps.
Keleher said the program is aimed at quickly explaining what tools it has available for protecting children from inappropriate content, and monitoring what they access. A part of that program includes demonstrations and instruction about Google’s Family Link app, which helps parents create Google accounts for children younger than 13, and add layers of supervision to existing ones.
The program also addresses online safety, digital citizenship and media literacy — something important to Keleher, she said. While she is concerned about content with explicit sex or violence, she is also worried about her kids learning inaccurate information about educational subjects or current events.
“We can talk about those other things pretty easily, and they are something that parents can guide and talk about, but misinformation is so much harder to battle,” Keleher said. “Being able to see what they are watching on YouTube, or keeping them from going to this really weird news site that isn’t actually a news site, helps.”
This is the second year in a row the Pershing PTA has received a four-digit grant from the National PTA. Last year it received $1,000 for STEM-related activities for students, including a club and a fair.
Keleher said this grant was competitive: Only 50 were awarded across the country. But Keleher said that once grant openings were announced, this one stood out for its relevance and lifelong scope.
“As impossible a task as it seems, you can exert guidance for your kids online and help mold them into the kind of digital citizen you want them to be,” Keleher said. “We are all digital citizens, and our citizenry is so much larger than just Pershing, or Springfield.”
