Kids on the Net
With studying early childhood this particular session really appealed to me. I have often been concerned about allowing children to go onto the internet to complete “research” particularly in whole class situations as it is difficult to monitor what each student looks at and it is very easy for them to become sidetracked. Kidzui I believe provides a solution to this problem. It is made up of kid’s pages from the web and each and every page has been reviewed by teachers, parents and people who are passionate about kids. While it does only provide basic results, sometimes this is all young children need. They don’t need to be bombarded with hundreds of search results that they then have to filter through, it’s just not practical. Zoeybot was another search engine we explored and I think it would be a good tool that parents could use to help their children with research.
The best thing that came from this session though was a range of different sites we explored that were specifically “for kids”. Quite eye opening as some of the sites that were recommended contained completely inappropriate content. On the other hand I discovered beanbaglearning.com which allows teachers, parents and older students to search for tutors based on subject area or tutor name. But the best site I discovered was lookybook.com. I am completely addicted and have used this site for a number of assignments in the last couple of weeks. It allows you to literally browse through children’s books and displays them page by page. It then provides the option to buy. A great resource that I will definitely use! It may even be appropriate to let young children read the books online themselves. All in all a very helpful and interesting tutorial!!
