Right now I'm reading The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brainsby Nicholas Carr. He wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine a few years back called “Is Google making us Stoopid?” and this book is essentially an elaboration on that.

Carr is a technology writer critical of how the Internet may be affecting the way we think. Our heavy-duty usage of the web may be essentially rewiring our brains, he argues, and he makes a pretty convincing argument.

I automatically think of the availability of internet and facebook for kids to use for homework. When they research, they're not breaking out the encyclopedias gathering dust at the library; they're going online where everything is “scan-able.”

Are your teenage daughters on Pinterest? If you haven't already heard of Pinterest, you will soon. It's becoming super popular, especially among young women and teen girls.

Pinterest is an online display of anything and everything you like, which you can organize into theme-based collections called “pinboards.” You can pin your own favorites, but you can also surf around other users' pinboards and follow them, re-pin them, or simply hit “like.”

As a high school teacher, I often run across the road blocks my school district has set up to inhibit students from using social networking sites during class time. Much like parental controls this is tactical maneuver from schools intended to protect the students. Unfortunately it’s not unlike sticking a finger in the proverbial damn. The plethora of social media sites that high school students have access to is astounding. And which ones are popular or trendy changes on a weekly basis.

As a parent, I worry about my daughters' self-images a lot. I worry about them hearing their classmates say “I'm fat” and wondering if that means they need to lose weight – at 8 years old. I worry about the sexualization of little girls at a younger and younger age.

I also worry about a disturbing YouTube trend where preteen girls post videos of themselves, asking viewers to respond to some variation of the question “am I pretty or ugly?” It takes cyberbullying to a whole new level.

Everyone these days belongs to some kind of social network - teens in  particular are enamored with social media and facebook for kids. They love having the ability to know everything that their friends are doing at all times, all the time. One of those social networks is called FourSquare, and many of you know what it is, or at least heard it mentioned.

For those of you who don't know what FourSquare is; its a social network, most commonly used through an "App" on a mobile phone. Users are encouraged to "Check-in" when they arrive at any number of locations. Restaurants, bars, schools, offices and even homes and apartments have the ability to create a location where any user can "Check-in" and receive points for doing so. Companies most often use the service to promote deals and encourage visitors, but kids and teens most often use the social network as a game to see who can get the most points.

Many of us have a love-hate relationship with our child’s favorite online games. Sure, they encourage hand-eye coordination, problem-solving, team play, and friendships with peers. But we also worry about child predators, cyberbullying, online game addiction, decreased performance in school, and exposure to violence and other adult content. And did you know your child’s gaming frequency might be an indicator of how they feel about you as a parent?

In a study of 500 middle school students conducted by the University of Michigan, results showed that kids who played more online games were more likely to report a negative relationship with their parents than kids who rarely or never played. Heavy game-players were more likely to describe their parents as “nagging” and “providing less supervision.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg may not have invented social networking, but he certainly dominates it. Facebook is by far the most popular social network for adults, teens, and tweens. In fact, it's such an integral part of the Internet that a lot of kids simply don't know how they would live without it.

Five or ten years ago, a lot of kids used to spend time “surfing the Internet,” looking for sites to occupy their time and attention. Now it's much more common for kids to log onto Facebook and spend hours surfing the site, exploring their friend's walls for hours on end.

A 2010 survey by Retrevo found that almost half of parents are Facebook friends with their children, a subject that most parents and children have strong feelings about one way or the other. Many parents will use parental controls or parental monitoring for Facebook for kids.

Some parents make two-way “friending” an absolute requirement for their social-networking kids to keep their Facebook accounts. Parents at the other end of the spectrum have declined their kids' friend requests, believing that parents and children should never be Facebook friends at all.

Are you Facebook friends with your kids?

As all parents know, cyberbullying is a widespread problem that most kids today will unfortunately run into at some point in their lives. Many people brush it off as “kids will be kids,” but for some tween and teen victims the bullying has been the source of anxiety, depression, and other emotional and behavioral problems. Some have even taken their own lives in response to unrelenting cyberbullying.

Facebook is one popular social media network that is unfortunately the platform for a lot of cyberbullying that goes on. Facebook has included bullying FAQ for victims and parents of victims on its website, but has been criticized for not doing more.

Tweens and teens often spend hours grooming their blog or Facebook profile until it perfectly reflects their personalities. Facebook for kids is growing in popularity as a form of self expression and communication. In fact, that is today's teenager's preferred form. But is there a way for your kids to do it safely?

Blogging safety actually begins way before your child makes his or her very first post. Here are some key points about teaching blogging safety for parents to remember:

1. Sit down and talk with your child and why he wants a blog and what he hopes to accomplish with it. Discuss rules for what kind of blog he or she will be creating.

In spite of October being National Bullying Prevention Month, November saw two very sad and poignant suicides egged on by cyberbullying. 10-year-olds Jasmine McClain and Ashlynn Conner both took their lives just one week apart.

Your kids probably know, understand, and have an opinion about Twitter. Do you? Its another alternative to Facebook for kids...

Twitter is a social networking site based on the premise that you can get all the information you need to know in short bursts of 140 characters (or less) called tweets.

Cyberbullying has the potential to hurt a victim in every aspect of life, including school performance. If a kid is being bullied, attempts to improve school performance without addressing the bullying are unsuccessful. One California bill aims to correct that.

Anti-bullying bill AB 1156 expands the definition of bullying to recognize its profound effects on victims. Bullying has a detrimental effect on mental and physical health, and bullied kids are unable to participate in school activities and resources like their peers.

Every parent knows that Facebook for kids and children on social networking sites need to vigilantly safeguard their privacy.  Apparently lawmakers know that too, and legislators in California are proposing a new bill aimed at protecting the privacy of social networking users.

Initially, the proposed bill only applied to users under 18, but that provision has since been struck and the bill would now apply to users across the board regardless of age. It would require social networking websites to:

Most of the time, when we talk about sexting (the act of sending nude or suggestive photos of yourself via cell phone) we focus on the harm it does to our girls. Of course I’m concerned about the risks of our girls posing for racy photos and distributing them – especially in high school – but what about our boys? Boys sext, too, almost as much as girls do.

Why do boys sext? A lot of reasons: peer pressure, to be funny or gross, or as a form of flirting. In fact, boys seem particularly likely to flirt by sexting.