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Hey, companies, tablets are family devices too!

November 29, 2011 By Anne Leave a Comment

Someone should find out how many parents there are at Apple, Amazon, and other tablet makers. But maybe it doesn’t matter – no matter how many there are, they’re just not thinking like parents in designing and marketing iPads, Kindles, and other tablet devices. They need to stop compartmentalizing their lives so much and put on their parent hats at work! Because tablets are every bit as much family devices as personal ones. As parent, blogger, and search engine expert Danny Sullivan writes in “Why do Amazon and Apple hate families?”, “My wife desperately wishes she didn’t have all our kids’ apps cluttering her [iTunes] account [for iPads as well as iPhones, of course]. A friend of hers was recently telling me the exact same wish, how she didn’t want all these apps on her phone. How can they transfer them to their kids? They can’t…. Then there’s the Kindle,” Sullivan further writes. He’s owned one for less than a year, has grown to love it, but Amazon only lets family members and friends do what comes very naturally with books – share them – with a small percentage of the books it sells for the Kindle. That’s absurd, when people are spending almost as much for the Kindle versions as they are for the kind with paper and printing costs but without the same built-in sharing privileges. Sullivan calls for kids’ iTunes accounts (separate apps, same billing) or family accounts (how about like what the mobile carriers provide) with separate sign-ins and family and friend lending. That may sound daunting, authentication-wise, but account holder could provide authentication without sharing his/her password (we certainly don’t want to encourage password-sharing; see this).] Who wants to start a digital petition?!

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Filed Under: Parenting, Social Media Tagged With: Amazon, Apple, family technology, iPad, iTunes, Kindle, Parenting, tablets

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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