March is just around the corner and you know what that means…!
Media Mentor Month is a global education initiative designed to help parents/teachers develop a supportive relationship with their children/students around digital technologies. It provides prompts to celebrate positive uses of technology, explore creative pursuits, and encourage us to take time for important conversations about how we best use our devices.
The pandemic has reinforced the importance of maintaining and developing these positive relationships with young people. Globally, many students have had to work through extended periods of hybrid learning and/or online learning, bringing with it many challenges.
With this in mind, I invite you to join me once again to participate in Media Mentor Month, where, in addition to the Monopoly-style game board for Elementary students/parents, we now have a Middle/High school edition! For these older students, we developed some conversation starters around a series of weekly themes:
- 🗣 Communication
- 🗓 Organization
- 🧘🏽 Well-Being
- 📱 Social Media
- 🧠 Learning
We know students benefit from sharing with their peers. They have often developed sophisticated strategies and approaches that others could learn from, e.g. how they manage distractions, or their use of extensions or apps to stay productive. We adults can learn many great tips just by listening once we have offered a prompt.
Parents might choose to find a topic of interest and drop some of the suggestions into conversations. Teachers might select one a day to focus on with a whole class, or use a prompt in a 1:1 mentoring conversation. However you choose to use them, you can find them embedded below, or view them via the link here.
Below you can find the Elementary Game Board (we recommend printing A3 size)
Click here to access the A3 Board Game in English
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Click here to access the A3 Board Game in Chinese
For individual versions of the gameboard prompts, please see below:
We hope you will join us in completing some of the activities and look forward to seeing your tweets using the hashtag #MediaMentorMonth!
For further reading relating to Media Mentor Month, please see the links below:
Media Mentors, Not Media Police – blog post explaining the background to our first MMM, including research findings and book recommendations.
Managing Distractions with Mario – blog post containing strategies for creating the conditions for successful learning
More Digital Parenting Conversation Ideas – myths about screen time and some healthy habits to foster.
Speaking to G12 about Digital Wellness – a video of my talk with WAB senior students earlier this year, highlighting potential positives and negatives of technology for their consideration.
Media Mentor 2021 – Our fourth iteration of Media Mentor Month.
Media Mentor 2020 – Our third iteration of Media Mentor Month.
Media Mentor 2019 – The second Media Mentor Month.
Media Mentor 2018 – Our inaugural Media Mentor Month!
Tip of the Iceberg 