ForKids -- Cool/fun/safe programs and websites for young'uns; and resources for parents.

Top 10 Android Parental Control Apps

"This list contains apps that restrict functionality, keep tabs on locations and report online activities. All in all the 10 Android parental control apps try to cover almost every aspect of parental control, from mild to paranoid."

How to Lock Down Your Android Tablet or Smartphone for Kids

Free-Range Parenting: Be a Helium Parent, Not a Helicopter One

"We should hold on to our children as a child holds on to a balloon. Let them rise, float on their own, but keep a grasp on the string. "

Online Safety Tips for Kids, Students and Teens

"This post offers some online safety tips, especially for kids, students and teens, and can be used by anyone to see that he or she is not negatively affected while using the Internet."

Completely Protect Your Windows PC with Microsoft Family Safety

"Family Safety imbues your Windows account with a veritable cornucopia of monitoring and filtering tools that allow you to put up a virtual wall that you can exploit to monitor and filter app, game, and web activity. In other words, you are the boss."

How to Use Parental Controls on Windows 7

"Windows 7’s parental controls are pretty basic, but they’re effective and much better than having nothing at all. Plus, they can be used in conjunction with something like OpenDNS to filter websites and online activity."

All Special Effects In This Music Video Show Off Scientific Concepts

8 Ways to Toddler-Proof Your iPhone or iPad

8 Ways to Toddler-Proof Your iPhone or iPad "Tips, tricks and general advice for parents with Apple-based tablets or smartphones and inexhaustibly curious 2-to-3-year-olds"

How to Raise Happy Kids: 10 Steps Backed by Science

How to Raise Happy Kids: 10 Steps Backed by Science: "Now there’s tons of info on raising smart kids and successful kids, but how do you raise happy kids?

Sometimes it’s hard to balance what’s best for children with what makes them happy — but the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive."

What Parents Need to Know About Web Filtering and Parental Controls

"It’s easy to set up parental controls and filter the web. These features are built into everything from Windows to the iPad. But none of these filtering solutions is perfect."

How to Lock Down Your iPad or iPhone For Kids

"iPads and iPhones give you control over how your kids can use your devices. You can quickly lock your device to a certain app before handing it over or lock down an entire device with comprehensive parental controls."

‘Flow’ is a pretty, simple, and strangely compelling free game

"Do you enjoy strange, off the wall games that most people might consider ‘odd’ because they don’t follow set conventions for modern gamers? If so, you’re going to love ‘Flow’, a free browser based game. It offers a very pretty game environment, simple but compelling game play, and can be installed as a Chrome App (shortcut) if you should desire to do so."

Silk — Interactive generative art

You can change colors and patterns in the lower left corner.

Don't Be Bored, Be Unbored

"The hardbound tome is an activity book for children aged 8 and up, with over 350 beautifully designed and illustrated pages that encourage kids to use their natural curiosity and skills to be creative and to try to change the world."

Kurupira Web Filter

"Kurupira is a customizable web filter that enables you to protect your kids from inappropriate online content. You also set daily time limits, restrict access to applications and keep track of websites that were visited"

Are kids saying they're bored? Break out the Bucket of Boredom.

When our kids were younger, a common refrain in the summer was "I'm bored!". So my wife and I created the Bucket of Boredom: a container filled with things to do. If they said out loud that they were bored, they had to draw something from the bucket, and they had to do it.

It has some fun thing to do in it, but also some chores and some goofy time-wasting stuff, because our goal was not only to give them something to do, but to get them to stop complaining of boredom and think of things to do themselves (and because if it was all rainbows and ice cream they'd use it all up on day one and get sick of it). So in other words, they quickly learned that they had to really be bored to take the chance on the BoB.

My wife, an inveterate scrapbooker, fancied up our Bucket (a plastic jar with a screw-on lid) with letters and pictures, but even an old shoebox or coffee can would work. We printed out a list of things, cut them apart and folded them, and put them in the Bucket, and when the kids were really and truly bored, and willing to take a chance, they'd draw one out.

Some of the items were retired after one use, some items were put back in after they were drawn, and we added new ones as we thought of them. The kids never knew what was in there, although they did suggest things (that we may or may not have added). Anyway, you get the idea.

Here's the list of items we started with:

Track, restrict, and record activity on your PC with ‘Verity Parental Control’ | freewaregenius.com

Math at Bedtime: Sign Up Here

"Every night across the country children’s literacy is being improved as parents sit down to read their children a bedtime story. We perceive a story to be a relaxing and quiet way to spend the time before we put a child to bed. There is no reason why we can’t do the same thing with math and science."

KidLogger

"KidLogger enables you to log and monitor PC and Internet activity on your computer. The program can keep track of websites visited, applications used, keystrokes typed and even capture screenshots of desktop activity"

Monitor your child’s Facebook activity with Minor Monitor

Monitor and Analyze Your Child’s Facebook Activity Automatically

"With the media’s glaring attention on cyber-bullies, parents are becoming increasingly concerned about their children’s Facebook activities. Parenting magazines and websites recommend friending your child, but this alone does not provide a clear picture of what is really happening on your child’s Facebook account. Facebook monitoring services are starting to appear on the web. One free one that provides a wealth of information for parents is Minor Monitor."

Little Voice Commander

"This simple program encourages toddlers to speak and experiment by showing pictures of words they are likely to know, such as "dog," "apple," or, well, "baby," whenever a word is spoken or when a key on the keyboard is pressed. A sound file also speaks the word out loud."

The Kid Should See This.

"There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen."

Physion - Physics Simulation Software

Free. "Physion is a 2D Physics simulation software. It can be used to easily create a wide range of interactive physics simulations and educational experiments. Teachers may find it particularly useful since it can be used as a virtual physics laboratory through which they can demonstrate some basic physics concepts in the classroom. "

KeyFreeze

"KeyFreeze is a simple program that allows you to lock your keyboard and mouse so that small children can safely chat with their grandparents on Skype or watch a DVD without causing interruptions by playing with the mouse or keyboard. "

Stykz

"Stykz is a stickfigure animation program that was inspired by the popular Pivot Stickfigure Animator software."

Kid-Key-Lock

"Kid-Key-Lock is a simple but effective program to prevent small children from accidentally deleting files or changing system settings while they are using your computer."

Kodu Teaches Your Kids to Visually Program Their Own Video Games

10 Video Websites for Kids That Are Safe and Fun

Zoodles Corrals Kids in a Safe and Educational Browser

"If you're looking for a kid-friendly way to let a young child interact with your computer without the risk of them deleting important files or getting into content they shouldn't see, Zoodles is a kid-friendly browser."

Alice

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

Science News for Kids

"Science News for Kids is a web site devoted to science news for children of ages 9 to 14. Our goal is to offer timely items of interest to kids, accompanied by suggestions for hands-on activities, books, articles, Web resources, and other useful materials."

inudge.net - Nudge

Nudge is a cool little web-based multi-track music maker.

Create Your Own Comic Book, No Experience Necessary

"The real fun, though, is adding characters. For someone with no artistic talent, this is huge. There’s roughly 50 different hero and villain poses to choose from. Again, you can rotate and resize any of them."

Auburn Elementary's Big List of Links For Students

Organized by subject and grade.

Storybird: cute web-based storybook publishing

"Storybird is a place for kids and parents to read and create storybooks. It's completely kid-friendly and features a gallery of great artwork that you can use to get started. "

Qimo - an Operating System designed for kids

"Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up.
Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want. "

toneMatrix - click synth

Click your pattern and hear it played, then modify it as you wish. See you in a few hours! :-)

KidsMenu is a Kid-Friendly Interface for Windows

Help Keep Children Safe Online with KidZui

"If you are looking for a fun way to help keep your children safe online KidZui may be the perfect option."

Big list of links for kids

Separated by subject and age.

CrazyLittleFingers Rewards Your Toddler's Curiosity

"Windows only: CrazyLittleFingers is a keyboard locking application... CrazyLittleFingers corresponds the keystroke to a picture and sound related to the key."

Baby Smash! Kid-Proofs Your Computer

Two cool programs for kids of any age

My kids and I have been using some cool programs lately. Both are free, and Windows, Mac, and Linux versions are available.

Phun: physics simulator -- build and wreck stuff to your heart's content with this 2D physics sandbox. There's lots of videos on YouTube and other Phun-user sites that show just how complex you can get with this; but even very young kids can get the hang of it easily. My favorite part: create a shape, then liquefy it and watch gravity do its thing. The clouds that roll by occasionally are a nice touch.

Audacity: simple sound editor that lets you do multi-track recording… record a song, then add some sound effects and a beatbox track; or see what's it like singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" with a few clones of yourself. Some hints:

change a few settings to make things easier: have existing tracks played while recording new tracks (so you can hear to match things up); and set recording to mono mode so you can fit more tracks on the screen and not have to look at empty ones (mic recording is mono anyway)
start with a "click track": make a track of "one… two… three… four… one… two… three… four" to help keep the beat, then just delete that track as the final step; and start your other tracks after the first set of counts (like bands do when the drummer counts it down)
to record multiple tracks, just record something and hit Stop, then hit Record again: a new track will be created and recording will start.

Enjoy.

Cyber Security Tip -- Keeping Children Safe Online

"Children present unique security risks when they use a computer—not only do you have to keep them safe, you have to protect the data on your computer. By taking some simple steps, you can dramatically reduce the threats."

Kidnetic

From the Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter:"Kidnetic is filled to the brim with adiverse selection of original games, challenges, quizzes, and educational tools guaranteed to keep children actively inspired for hours at a time."

Top 10 Sites for Students

Top Ten Sites for Teachers

Yahoo! Teachers, a social network for teachers

"When launched, it will allow teachers to create, modify and share standards based curriculum."

10 ways to entertain young children for $1 or less

"These classic toys and activities can be created with stuff you probably already have lying around your house. "

iKeepSafe Internet Safety Coalition

"The iKeepSafe.org website uses an animated icon / mascot named Faux Paw the Techno Cat to teach children the importance of protecting personal information and avoiding inappropriate places on the Internet."

WebWiseKids

"Web Wise Kids is about empowering today’s youth to make wise online choices. Through state-of-the-art computer games—based on real-life scenarios—community and youth leader involvement and parents, Web Wise Kids creates a safer, more friendly internet experience."

SafeKids.com

"Your family's guide to making the internet and technology safe, fun, and productine."

FBI Publications - A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety

"While on-line computer exploration opens a world of possibilities for children, expanding their horizons and exposing them to different cultures and ways of life, they can be exposed to dangers as they hit the road exploring the information highway."

Tips for Kids - ways to keep kids safe around dogs

Leave no child inside

"Getting kids outdoors more, riding bikes, running, swimming—and, especially, experiencing nature directly—could serve as an antidote to much of what ails the young. "

Cozi, family-ready software

"Through Cozi users can access their family calendar, schedules, and notes information that are stored in the family's personal system, even when they are on the go. Reminders can be sent out and accessed by any PC or mobile phone you choose. "

Kidz CD 1 - Surf Station

"Surf Station is a web browser interface for young children (6 years or younger) that allows them to access popular internet contents in several categories including Games, Stories and Television."

Meet Me at Midnight

"Fascinating game teaches kids about art."

Great American Backyard Campout

This yearly event encourages experiencing a night outside.

Periodic Table of the Elements - Flash Version

"The Royal Society of Chemistry has created a fascinating virtual look intothe Periodic Table of Elements. The site offers an original artistic interpretation of each element, information on its history, electronconfiguration and current uses."

Free Software to assist running a Derby

Free software to assist in running a Pinewood Derby or other race. Automatically uses Partial Perfect N charts, takes care of lane assignments and scoring. Nice. Please read all items, or at least the one dated today, so that you're aware of two bugs. I don't know if you're out there anywhere, dknowles67, but thanks for the software, and if there's any chance we could get you clean up those two things, that would be sweet.

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