Your challenge: help your teen understand that digital content
can be useful or easy-to-locate as well as misleading or
unreliable. This may be tricky if your teen has the best
technical skills of anyone in your household. Still, you don't
need to be a computer genius to help your teen "navigate
messiness," as the Center for Children and Technology puts it.
Eventually your teen will see there is no single authority for
information; to make sense of a topic, he must sift through many
sources. It's not enough to quote a source or to declare, "I
read it online so it must be true" or “I saw this same
information posted by dozens of people within a social network.”
To form independent opinions, he must wrestle with ideas — and
where these ideas come from. 6 Ways to Make the Most of Online
Information - Encourage your teen to question all digital
resources. Have your teen ask: Where does this information come
from? How does this website's information (text, images, overall
look and feel) shape my understanding? Wha