Home Technology Tools
Children need to be given chances to make mistakes, to learn and develop good habits. Talking about issues, mistakes, and missteps is important.
It may be easy to configure your router to limit screen time to 30-minutes per evening with a 7:30 bedtime to set boundaries, but some children will jump to multiple screens and use up all their screen time on entertainment instead of doing their homework. So these tools only go so far.
Every SLVUSD student has a Google Apps for Education account under the domain slvusd.org with access to email (Gmail), Google Docs, Google Classroom, Hangouts, and other Google applications. Have your child log into their account and show you what they are working on.
If your student is in 9th - 12th grade, you can have your students share their Google Drive with you to look at the work they have been doing at school.
Browsers keep a log of Internet activity that parents can check. Students can clear their history, so an empty or limited history of browsing may be a flag.
Turning off your home WiFi at night can prevent late-night YouTube sessions, or chatting with friends at inappropriate times and provide more time for other activities. Also, you may want to check to see if you have parental controls on your WiFi Access Point. Here are some useful links for setting up the Parental Controls on your Home Wifi Network:
There are products that allow parents greater control over home internet. An example is Disney's circle which is a device that filters and/or disables home Internet for specific devices. From a parent's cell phone, you can pause the Internet for the entire house or just for the set of devices your child uses. You can set bedtimes, time-limits and content filters. You can get some visibility into what your child is doing on the home internet.
Both Apple and Google have tools to help us monitor our device usage. These tools are more about awareness than about control.
https://protectyoungeyes.com/blog/ provides some insights into tools for controlling and monitoring.