It sounds bad but a report by The New York Times suggests all that extra time spent surfing the net is actually a spike in reading and writing online, for both educational and entertainment purposes.

With the sense of community that can be found online, it’s hard to imagine that teenagers wouldn’t gravitate toward such an open means of communication. It’s all about how teens choose to use their time online. As long as they’re accessing valuable information, reading online could be time well spent.

The benefits are huge when it comes to interacting and getting instant feedback from your peers on something you’ve written or read. Users can log on to forums to ask questions about a reading assignment, to gain a better understanding of the subject.

Learning these skills early will be helpful later on for those who choose to go to college, where doing classwork on sites such as MSU’s ANGEL now plays a larger role in the overall education experience.

The New York Times also reports some countries will begin participating in assessments of students’ digital literacy as soon as next year. Similar literacy tests could eventually pop up in our schools if those abroad prove to be successful.

As with the Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests, schools would have to prepare students for the exam by teaching them the difference between credible and noncredible sources of information on the Internet. Distinguishing between well-written material and that ridden with Internet slang would also be crucial in helping students find and use the information they’re presented with.

Outside of school, the responsibility is on parents to make sure their children are using the Internet to its fullest potential. Reading stories or educational material online for a few hours a day is completely different from lurking in the shadows of MySpace.com for an entire afternoon.

Reading, writing and communicating with others online can help children to flex their brain muscles and build up their creativity skills. But clicking back and forth between chat windows, Web pages and word processing documents can kill your attention span and deplete the value of using any one medium to enhance your learning experience. It’s up to parents to help their children find the balance between using the Internet and picking up a book.

Parents should recognize the potential the Internet has to impact their child’s education, giving them a chance to read, write and discuss what they’ve learned with their peers around the world.