I wish I had known about Telstra’s Digital Mum program a few months ago. Even though I had been blogging for a couple of years and Twittering for a year, I hadn’t joined facebook. Then in June last year, in the lead up and aftermath of my 20 years school union (please don’t to the math and work out how old I am!!), many friends and old school acquaintances encouraged me to get on facebook. So many of us now had families and every one was keen to see what each others children looked like and stay in touch.
So with a spare moment one day I set up a facebook account. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing so when it asked me about finding friends via my email account, I thought that would be a fabulous way to kick start finding my friends and said yes to that. I then uploaded some photos and started connecting with friends new and old.
It wasn’t until people starting accepting my friend requests that I realised I had blurred my worlds. I had invited both people from my personal life and readers from the blog whose email addresses were in my list! Now, it is not that I don’t like my readers – because I do indeed, the issue was, did I want them to be seeing so much of my personal life???
Some friends from school were sharing photos and stories from our high school years, but did I really want my readers to see me when I was going through an experimental stage with my hair, where it was cut boy short and peroxided white? (I will say that I did have this hair style before Roxette came onto the scene.) Or photos of a tired and emotional 18 year old me at a friends birthday party? Image from Pop Video Station
Digital Mum has a great series of tutorials that you can go through which gives mums tips and advice on how to connect with your friends and your kids via social media. Rosso from Merrick and Rosso fame narrates the videos. In these videos they have taken an online family into the real world, so you can better understand how your social media and digital interactions can impact on your life. I would have done things very differently when setting up my facebook account if I had watched these videos first.
The Digital Mum 2.0 videos are very amusing, watch the one above which I think is pretty funny. A couple of the other lessons that I particularly liked were:
- Lesson 6 – Privacy, where you see mum’s old flame from 20 years ago rummaging through their house. He had friended her on facebook and felt like she had to accept!
- Lesson Two – Adding friends. The daughter walks in on her mum playing a game with her best friend. A key aspect of Digital Mum is that it also allows kids to contribute to the discussion on how they find the digital experience with their family.
The Digital Mum 2.0 program also has an easy to understand Guide To Social Networking which can be downloaded from the ‘Handy Links’ section on their facebook page. I will be using this guide when I start my facebook experience again. As I wasn’t aware of to manage my privacy settings or how to appropriately go about adding friends, I ended up deleted up my blurred worlds facebook account. 🙁
Telstra Digital Mum 2.0 Mobile Phone Give Away
Planning With Kids readers have the opportunity to win a LG Xenon GR500f mobile phone. Digital Mum will be making a video on Internet on the go and would like to hear from you what would be useful information that could help you best access the internet when you are away from the home. It could be how to use GPS or how to access facebook on your phone, the possibilities are endless.
To enter simply head to the Digital Mum 2.0 page on facebook, become a fan and leave your idea on what they should include in their video.
There are 2 LG Xenon GR500f mobile phones to give away. Telstra in conjunction with myself will select the winning entries, which Digital Mum will then put together to make a useful video for mums about Internet on the go. Entries must be written on the Telstra Digital Mum 2.0 page by 11:00am (AEDT) Sunday 28th February 2010 . Winners will be announced on Digital Mum 2.0 and Planning With Kids on Wednesday 3rd March. Looking forward to reading your ideas.