Video transcript

Daniel Donahoo (digital learning adviser): A family technology plan really can just be a list of dot points of things that the family agrees on. You can start with 3 simple questions: who is using the technology, where can they use it, and when?

It’s really important that a family technology plan is created with your children, that it’s not just a set of rules that the parents come up with, and you could even include really young children in the development of a plan. Their role might just be to draw a phone and draw the 3 apps on that phone that they would like to play with, and that can be their contribution to the plan.

Part of the process is the conversations that you have while you’re formulating that plan. You can talk about what’s important to the children in terms of how they want to use technology, and you, as parents, can explain to them why you want to manage it in different ways or why it needs to be done in certain areas or why you only want them to play computer games on the weekend, and the strength of the plan is actually in the conversations that you have in formulating the plan, and the plan is just the thing that you can refer back to when people may not be actually following the rules that are on that plan.