Common Sense Media–A champion for kids, parents, and teachers

We’re thrilled to add  to our client roster. We’ve admired their work for years as we’ve covered the intersection of technology and education for . Common Sense Media offers parents and teachers tools to help navigate the sometimes perilous, often exhilarating, online world and harness its power for good. Best known for their rating systems of all things media, they’ve quickly become a leader in the field, offering developmentally appropriate ratings of everything from games to apps to movies, informing parents about privacy and safety online, and creating a rich curriculum for educators to teach kids how to be good online “citizens.” They are truly helping kids thrive in a digital world.

We’ll be blogging twice weekly about their  and its many, many opportunities for educators and kids, as well as doing some original reporting from the front lines in classrooms. Sarah and I spent Friday afternoon in their San Francisco offices with the education team, and came away both hugely impressed and excited to get started. So often, teachers today are expected to add digital media literacy to their already-heavy load. They’re suddenly teaching a subject no one taught them to teach. Common Sense Media offers them guidance on teaching digital literacy, plus the tools teachers need to take on this added roll. Equally important, the curriculum is based on sound research (developed in collaboration with Harvard’s ), and in a world of for-profit education, it’s refreshingly FREE.

The curriculum teaches kids how to be good citizens online–how not to bully or troll, how to navigate safely, how to judge what’s real and what’s fake, how to manage the ramifications of anonymity, how to protect one’s privacy, and how to be ethical members of an online community and more. In other words–how to be a good digital citizen.  We should all take the courses.