Of course, if they browse without some structure or keep their IM and Facebook accounts open while working, the web can be a disaster. But if you help them hone in on the problem, the homework helpers on the web are pretty darn good.

Young kids need to reinforce what they learned (or daydreamed through in school). In the traditional classroom if you don’t “get it” when the teacher presents it, you’re bound to suffer as problems get complex.

I like Discovery Education because it’s engaging and fun. Its homework help site provides skill-building sessions in math, science, English, social studies, and others; many of the lessons use smart, engaging videos. Click on “Whole Number Multiplication,” for example, and you’ll get a video that walks you step-by-step through the problem using a marathon race and gym as examples. For English, you can learn nouns by taking a pictorial video tour of the desert.

OK, he’s got an unfortunate name, but one of the best stops for older kids (junior high and above) on the homework help circuit is BJPincheck’s Homework Helper. BJ started organizing websites that can help with various subjects when he was just nine years old. Today he’s in college and he’s still at it. He picks good references and indicates the targeted age.

Of course, every parent wants to know whether it’s OK or not to use Wikipedia when the kids are doing homework. Remember that Wikipedia is a collection of articles written by anyone who feels they have expertise in the subject. For the most part, Wikipedia is terrific, but there are biased and mistaken articles. Many teachers ask that kids use only one Wikipedia source, if any, in their research. In general, Wikipedia is more accurate with historical articles than recent current events. Recent articles are subject to more personal interpretation and less vetted by time.

Not sure of when the War of 1812 took place? If you want the facts–facts on every science from geology to weather and every period in history–try FactMonster for a quick dose of reality.

Now, the greatest guilty pleasure of the school-aged set…YouTube. Kids will watch fart movies or fornicating kitty cats for hours, but when tamed, YouTube can be a homework helper. For older students and lifelong learners, the YouTube Education site has lectures and talks from the great universities and professors worldwide. For kids, all you need to do is filter out the crap and leave the benign. Special web software like Vidzui or Kideos weed out inappropriate materials. Both are fun and carefully arranged from ages pre-K through grade 9.

If all else fails and you parents haven’t a clue as to what the gerund in the sentence is, you might consider an online tutor like the ones at Tutor.com. You register at the site and specify the problematic subject and your grade level. Just like a good date, you’re matched with the perfect tutor for a one-to-one session. There is a charge, but there are lots of ways to pay–for a single use, a monthly fee, or a number of sessions.

There are many new solutions that provide younger folks with a proving ground for experiencing the Internet and social networking. One of the newest is FaceChipz. FaceChipz is interesting for two reasons. First, it has a physical component. You buy a pack of five FaceChipz at retail. Second, you are limited to having a one-to-one relationship with your FaceChipz friends. Think of it as a sort of permanent BFF relationship. FaceChipz is about you and your friend (not plural) having an online relationship.

Here’s how it works. You purchase a five-pack of FaceChipz at places like Toys”R”Us. A chip looks very much like a colorful poker chip. Each chip has a unique ID number on it. You enter the website using the unique ID found on the chip.

Here comes the unique part. Once you’ve registered your chip you can hand it over  to your BF (Best Friend). They enter the same code from the chip into their PC.  When they do you and your friend are connected on the FaceChipz site. If you don’t  physically exchanged chipz your profile remains hidden. In addition, parents need to sign up their children to be a part of the site, which increases the safety aspect.

Once you’re signed up and have a friend, you can use FaceChipz similarly to how you use Facebook. You create a profile,  post pictures, and share electronic trinkets with friends. The FaceChipz sell in packs of five for $5 and there’s a one-time $1 fee for processing the parent’s application.

Parents are enamored of this newcomer because it provides a low risk, controlled taste of social networking. I was a bit put off by the fact that  creating a group of  friends requires a convulted sharing of chips. If I invite you and you invite a friend, I need to get a chip from the new friend in order to become a group.  I tested it with some 10-year-old kids  (as well as some adults) and they had a similar reaction.  They’d prefer a site where they could have multiple friends  created  with less work.  Still, if you’re looking for a training wheels approach to internet safety consider Facechipz.

The Nick Edition follows on the heels of a Disney announcement for a pink or blue encased ASUS netbook that it calls the NetPals Netbook. Both machines are honest-to-goodness entry-level netbooks, ones that any adult on a budget would be happy to own. What makes them kid-friendly are decoration, software, a custom UI, and lots of parental control software

Beneath the green and white Viacom slime on the cover of the PC lurks a Dell Inspiron Mini. A Nick widget (which wasn’t quite ready to be demonstrated) will take junior right to Nickland. There they’ll find feature games of the week, first-run Nick shows, an MP3 and more. WhyVille, a highly respected social networking site that caters to a “thinking” kid, is also featured prominently.

When it comes to speeds and feeds, both Disney/ASUS and Nick/Dell machines have similar specifications: Atom processors, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and a built-in webcam. Both run XP. Both weigh under 3 lbs. Dell adds a Lo-Jack–a sensible addition for parents sending kids into a world where they’d forget their pants if they weren’t wearing them. Dell did not announce pricing, but expect it to be competitive with the Disney NetPal.

According to Dell, Maria Bailey, CEO of BSM Media, helped set the mission. Moms and dads are looking for brands they can trust, access to entertainment and education, and a protected environment.

Dell is going to miss the back to school buying spree, but when it does become available in October you’ll find the Nick Edition at Wal-Mart or on Dell.com.

Undecided whether to be in the SpongeBob/iCarly or Little Mermaid/Hannah Montana camp? Don’t worry–I’m sure it’s a matter of moments before you’ll be able to add a few other kid-themed netbooks to the menu. The injustice of it all may be that your kid gets a netbook before you do.

Don’t spend your $6.99 on the download just yet, though. Hidden Park is park-specific. It’s now available in 10 parks around the world, including Central Park for New Yorkers like me.

The game begins with a video call from a troll who just happens to be the head of the Magical Wildlife Protection Association. The troll instructs the kids to save their park from nasty land developers. To do so, they’ll need to collect evidence of magical animals in the park.

Each park has certain designated landmarks that you navigate to using the iPhone’s built-in GPS. Because the iPhone knows your coordinates, it can trigger certain clues and puzzles at various waypoints. But the real “wow” comes when your young explorers photograph the landmarks. After taking a photo, give the iPhone a few shakes and hidden magical animals appear in the photo. Photos get stored in the iPhone as a picture memory of the day. An online community invites kids to share their adventures and photos.

Games like this one will proliferate as more and more hardware devices are location-aware. Of course, there’s bound to be a dark side of location-aware devices, too, but for the moment let’s give three cheers to The Hidden Park.

And special thanks to Hal Halprin for sending it my way.

There’s something really creepy about paying your kids to learn…or is there?

The New York Times recently ran an interesting piece on whether or not kids learn better when they’re given material incentives. Historically, educators have frowned on rewards. They want very much to believe that education, the pursuit of knowledge, is reward enough.

The concept of education as its own reward is starting to feel a bit dated in a world where everything is measured on the immediate return on investment. In an era when life is about accumulating stuff–coupons, trinkets, friends, and more–for many kids, it’s starting to look as if rewards for learning might do the trick. As parents, we give our kids everything from allowance money to toys/games/clothing as a way to reward their good behaviors. The hope is that these extrinsic rewards will become intrinsic as the kids grow older. Purists argue that kids are born explorers and their love of exploration translates to the love of learning, but let’s face it: Multiplication tables and fractions are not exploratory territory. They require route memorization tasks and most kids find this sort of learning far less compelling than just about anything else they could be doing.

As I ponder, I’m at a conference called DEMO 09 that showcases new products and start ups in the technology space. I just watched an exciting demo of a SmartyCard, an online learning world for kids ages 7-12 where they get rewards for learning. The creators of the system aren’t being subversive, either. The company’s slogan is YOU LEARN, YOU EARN.

The content is mostly in the form of online quizzes with colorful graphics, simulations, and videos included. The content is grade-specific and compartmentalizes skills according to activities like “space” or “America” rather than the old “reading/math/science” classification.

As the child plays they earn points. The rewards are all virtual and they’re precisely the type of reward every 7-12 old covets: Club Penguin membership, iTunes music, WebKinz stuff, and more.

I’m loving the idea of virtual rewards for many reasons. First, kids learn to purchase their own virtual stuff–their currency is learning. Second, a virtual reward lets them personalize how they decide to spend. This makes them better consumers of all media. Finally, learning basic facts has never been scintillating stuff . Do you remember playing eraser tag in your classroom or any one of a number of other games to make memorization a bit more memorable? SmartyCards does the same thing, as did so much of what we’ve despairingly called edutainment.

I’m not advocating a Skinnerian education where material goods become the reason for learning. But kids’ work is schoolwork, and their job is to do it well. Everyone expects compensation for a job well done and that means both the knowledge that they’ve done good work and a little salary, too.

You go, SmartyCard. You learn. You earn.

“Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children.”

For a child, today’s play is tomorrow’s work. Whether it’s playing with a toy doctor kit, a tea set, a digital camera and editing software, or inside of a virtual world, the skills they’ll need tomorrow are being honed.

But their skills will only be as good as the tools we give them. According to a recent report from NPD, a higher percentage of kids ages 4-14 are using computers than they are televisions. Fourteen percent of kids in this age group own their own computer. Twenty-eight percent use digital music players. Twenty percent own cellphones.

What they do with these tools is still a great social experiment. The web and consumer electronic devices have provided them with a vast sandbox in which to play and explore. A recent study from the MacArthur Foundation found that social networking is, contrary to many parents’ beliefs, a motivator—a place to practice both social and creative skills. Simulations teach them to play “what if” in the safety of a virtual environment. Educational software is able to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses with a granularity that a teacher in a classroom never could. The tools of youth—IM, chat, Facebook—are finding their way into the workplace. There’s an economic imperative to learn to play digitally.

At the  Kids at Play Summit http://kidsatplaysummit.com we’ve enlisted some of the greatest minds from education, journalism, product and content development, and academic research to paint a picture of why being digital changes everything.

In his book, Playing the Future, Douglas Rushkoff said, “Our kids may be younger than us, but they are also newer. They are the latest model of human being, and are equipped with a whole lot of new features. Looking at the world of children is not looking backwards at our own pasts—it’s looking ahead.”

Welcome to the future. I founded http://kidsatplaysummit.com as a forum to help the high tech industry continue to create and innovate in your respective fields so that kids everywhere can reap the benefits.

Disney is serious about reviving fairies this fall. As a prequel, pre-teen and teen girls are already flocking to Disney Fairies Pixie Hollow where they can create lithe and lovely fairies of their own, and flit about Pixie Hollow. When the movie, Tinker Bell, appears this fall, Disney will throw its media muscle behind fairies. The world they are creating would make Walt smile. It’s sweet, lovely, and oh-so-Disney.

For starters, we’ll be able to buy flying fairies. Licensed by WowWee, makers of the Dragonfly, there will be a line of flying, radio-controlled FlyTech Fairyflies, one named after each season. ($34.95)

Then there’s Jaaks Pacific. They’ll be selling a very cool line of fairy products that use motion control (like the Wii) to let girls control their fairy on their TV screens. A kit contains all the makings of a fairy: magic wand, ballet tutu, wings, and more. Imagine dressing up like a fairy and waving your magic wand to unfurl the magic. What self-respecting girl wouldn’t believe in fairies after that?

But the piece de resistance is the new Disney Fairies™ Pixie Hollow toys powered with Clickables™. These toys extend the play on the Fairies website (www.pixiehollow.com). A clickable item—like the bracelet in the photo above—can “click” with another Disney Fairies piece of jewelry, allowing girls to trade items from jewelry to jewelry, girl to girl. Once at home they can place their jewelry in a special jewelry box and whatever trade took place in real life between two friends shows up on their on-screen avatars in the Pixie Hollow world. As you play the games on Pixie Hollow you gain points towards things for your personal space in that world, and when you click bracelets in the real world you get points that you can redeem online.

This is a giant step toward the integration of online and offline toys. You can completely immerse yourself in your fairy’s life both on and off the screen. The game play is combined with virtual trading cards and social networking (between friends that “click”), which makes it feel extraordinarily seamless. The Disney Fairies Pixie Hollow line powered by Clickables technology is appropriate for girls ages seven and up. The toys are fairly inexpensive, ranging in price from $5.99 to $29.99.

The good news is that fairies represent a return to Disney’s block and tackle basics. It’s a welcome change from Hannah Montana, Rock Camp, and Zach and Cody. The not-so-good news is a foreshadowing of the pervasiveness of media in a way that’s never been experienced before. The virtual world of fairies no longer stops when the computer is shut down.

As you might imagine, that’s just the tip of the fairy iceberg. According to Brandweek, Disney licensed merchandise sales will hit $30 billion this year; $5 billion in fairies alone.

Disney still believes in fairies, big time. Do you?

Warren Buckleitner, founder of the learning lab Mediatech Foundation, teamed up with Consumer Reports WebWatch to author a compelling observation of the youngest of the Internet crowd, kids ages two through eight. The study tracked families with kids ages two to eight while their kids visited 21 specific kids’ websites, including popular favorites like Bratz, Club Penguin, BarbieGirls.com, and others.

What they found is not a surprise for those of us who’ve been on sites where young kids surf and play. But, if your kids are playing and you haven’t visited, let this be a cautionary tale.

One of the clearest findings of the study is that the Internet is a very commercial medium. (We suspected as much, but the study shows the problem from a kid’s point of view.) Kids are not equipped to deal with the decisions that the media presents.

Enticements to do the advertisers’ or sponsors’ bidding were many and varied. Some, says the study, invite kids to click on a temptation that whisks them directly to a registration page before they can go any further. Some let the kids create pets or avatars online but hold those creations hostage until the kids have ponied up a subscription fee. Most of the sites took a consumer-driven approach by offering various point systems where kids accumulate points or dollars that they can then use to spend on the site. And a number of sites required an offline purchase like a Bratz or WebKinz toy.

Particularly telling are the anecdotes and videos included in the report. These could be subtitled “When good kids click bad.” Stories of kids’ tantrums when parents say no, we’re not going to pay a subscription fee. Stories of kids all too willing to share personal information in order to enter a drawing or contest.

In a two-class world, sites are also segregating paying from non-paying members. There are tales of parents forgetting to renew their kids’ subscriptions and worrying that they’ll never regain their virtual property. Clearly, kids are dismayed when they’re having a good time on a site and are suddenly hit with a message saying, “you need to subscribe to play the next level.” Free games, like Addicting Games, have many different games to choose from; some are pure marketing and others may be downright inappropriate.

Realistically, websites need marketers the way a fish needs water. Without sponsorship or subscriptions there’ll simply be no play. And on the kids’ web you will either pay with your dollars or your willingness to interact with marketers.

The study goes on to offer recommendations for parents, developers, and policymakers on how to take the existing situation and live with it. The bottom line for parents is to understand that there is “no free lunch” on the Internet and that even the best sites for kids have their trouble spots.

Visit ConsumerWebWatch http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/pdfs/kidsonline.pdf for the full monty.

There are two different worlds of play: a Jungle theme and a hip hop music scene, each with their own games. ZooKazoo is also launching special projects like one for Earth Day that will educate and entertain.

To begin your ZooKazoo adventure, you create a profile page that features your Zelf – a cute name for yourself. Your Zelf roams around ZooKazoo’s worlds, meeting up with friends, chatting, and exchanging Zmails.

Much like other recent social network launches with kids in mind, you win points as you play games. These points, called Kazoobits, can be used to spiff up your avatar with accessories and buy virtual homes in the ZooKazoo lands. There’s a charitable component as well, which asks kids to give away some of their Kazoobits. Finally, the company says it plans to offer creativity tools for making paintings, photo projects, and more online.

The environment is a rich one and overtime, but I think that kids are looking for characters to identify with and games that really fit the virtual world that they’re in.