You remember it, don’t you? A paper plate with a fastener holding moving paper arms that rotated around the plate and pointed to your next familial task: mow the lawn, do the laundry, set the table. At our house, we got our allowances in return for doing what the wheel said. Some [...]

A few weeks ago, I noted that KidThing, PBS Kids, and others were kicking off a new wave of new and promising websites for kids. Add a few more to the list: KidZui, a web browser and service, Handipoints, and ZooKazoo are three newcomers to the ever-expanding world of communities for young kids on the [...]

No ifs, ands, or buts about it. The web is churning out some really interesting playplaces for young children. Places that find ways to keep them safe and keep them creative. It’s a renaissance of the early days of CD ROMs when good content for kids was abundant; the only difference is that the CD [...]

There’s been quite a fuss made over the XO, developed by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The OLPC vision was to design a low-cost, but powerful, connected PC in order to provide kids all over the world with Internet-power. OLCP wants to sell the XO in bulk to third world countries. After two [...]

It was inevitable that Barbie would meet social networking. BarbieGirls is a new virtual world, not unlike many other virtual worlds, except that this center of attention is on the things that Barbie cares about most passionately: room decoration, fashion, and chat. (Gag me with a spoon!)

There are a number of social networks that cater to the K-8 crowd, with a focus on kids ages 8-14. The idea behind these sites is to ask for some sort of parent authentication–a credit card number or a parent’s email–and also to involve the parent understanding what’s happening on the site.
We’ll look at: Club [...]