My six year old, Ashli, has a login on the family computer with a lot of internet shortcuts to sites like Pokemon Crater, PBS kids, and NASA kids. She has her own wallpaper of Ash and Pikachu and I downloaded a Cat theme for her firefox. She is getting to the age where she is independently getting on the computer and playing on these websites. The World Wide Web itself is hardly interesting to her as of yet, but she enjoys the puzzles and games on her websites.
Yesterday, I set her up with a Zoobuh account. Zoobuh is a child safe email service. The parent sets up the account and has administrative rights over the account. They have many different tools to make the service safe. Right now, I have Ashli set up so that she can only send and receive emails from people in the address book that I create and have sole administrative power over. I can always go in and read any email that she has sent or received. If I want, I can block attachments and links. Every email from the Zoobuh account comes with a disclaimer that the email was sent from a child. I think it is a great service and it was an idea that I had on my own and was glad I found a site that implemented it.
So far, Ashli has sent emails to Me, her mom, and her uncle. She thinks it is neat and it is helping her learn where the letters are on a keyboard. She told me that she wanted to learn how to type like me and her mom. I can now use the email to send her notes or a link to some cool kids website that I found for her. I will talk to a couple of her friends parents and maybe she will be able to email a couple of her friends too. It is only a matter of time before she wants email anyway, and this way, she gets it on my terms. It is better this, than her going to hotmail or gmail and setting up her own account in a couple of years that I have no access to. Zoobuh also has a setup for teens and the parent can change the prefrences at any time, so the site will grow with your child.
If you have kids, I would really check this out.
