Search this site!
 
toolbar

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this second week of January:


~~~~~~~~~~~ Sponsor ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Publishers Pipeline - low-cost or free educational software, housewares, PCs....
Jansport Children's Back Pack (Reg price $21.89, FREE after rebate)
Proctor-Silex 5 Speed Mixer (Reg price $19.95, FREE after rebate)
AM/FM Arm Band Sports Radio (Reg price $28.99, FREE after rebate)
Wet/Dry Car Vac (Reg price $29.55, $5.55 after rebate)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Family Tech: Separate PCs for parents, kids

Where household computing is concerned, the maxim definitely holds true: "Good fences make good neighbors." In his Family Tech column for the San Jose Mercury News this week, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid explains why, then tells how to keep parents' and kids' files separate even if there isn't enough family budget for more than one PC.

* * * *

Children's software: Our favorite scouting party

Whenever we and our kids are about to step into unknown edutainment territory it helps to have a trusted friend and adviser out there ahead of us. That's exactly how we'd describe Children's Software Revue, edited by educators who are also parents of young children. We recently interviewed CSR's founder and editor Warren Buckleitner to get a feel for their review process.

For starters, Warren told us every CD-ROM, piece of downloadable software, and console game they review is both family- and educator-tested and gets as many perspectives and sets of eyeballs as possible.

"The biggest difference between what we're doing and what other reviewers do is, we don't leave out products," Warren said, referring to the organization's strong editorial independence. "In Children's Software Revue, you'll see everything - the good, the bad, and the ugly." The Web site has a database of more than 4,700 software reviews, and it's constantly growing.

"We get about three products a day, on average," Warren told us. "Families come in and browse our new-software shelf. They'll check out a product and take it for two weeks." Letting a software product find its natural market or user tells CSR a lot, Warren explained. If a kid knows action games very well, he's going to be able to tell right away if the new one will measure up. The amount of time he spends with it also tells CSR what the product's longevity is going to be like - not something they'd find out in a controlled testing environment. Besides the local testers, CSR taps the expertise of 130 families nationwide.

But family-testing is just one useful perspective. That of educators is prominent, too. Take console games, for example. "We do look at them through an education lens," Warren said. "We're looking at how characters interact, what the implied cultural values are, the gender and ethnic biases. We try to dig a little deeper and think about what motives and messages are being sent by the product…. Every review is the start of a conversation."

All of CSR's online reviews are available for free with a subscription to the bimonthly magazine ($24/year). Minus the magazine, the entire database (behind a password in the Web site) is also available for two months for a $3.75 fee. "And you help support a group of stubbornly independent educators who don't feel like selling out for new minivans," as Warren put it." The database includes reviews of smart toys (those with microchips in 'em).

Here are some other great (free) features you'll appreciate at ChildrensSoftware.com:

As always, your views - on this resource and educational technology in general - are most welcome! Send comments via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

* * * *

Remembering a great man

Our thanks to FamilyEducation.com for pointing out the Seattle Times's special section on Martin Luther King, Jr.. (For our international friends, the great civil rights leader's birthday, Jan. 15, is marked annually with a US national holiday).

It was a hard-won national holiday. According to the Seattle Times backgrounder on the day

* * * *

Ed tech: The big picture

When we think way back to high school we don't picture what long-time education writer Roberta Furger describes in a recent issue of FamilyPC. We recall how steeped we were in the tiniest details of a very small world, how sure we were of the irrelevance of our classes to what lay ahead for us. But in magnet schools and virtual classrooms Roberta looks at in Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts, students' horizons and explorations are much broader than we remember ours to have been. With the help of technology, they're doing coursework their own schools couldn't afford to offer - in many cases real work, guided by professionals in relevant fields, that we might have done only at best as interns or research assistants during or after college. And Virtual High School students in many states are doing this relevant work shoulder to shoulder with peers in geographic, ethnic, and cultural areas that they wouldn't otherwise experience. We can't help but wonder what this would've done for our academic work way back when - how much more seriously we would've taken it and ourselves, and how much more interesting high school would've been!

As for the view from Washington, the US Department of Education has updated its policies on technology in the classroom. According to the New York Times, the DOE's latest report, "e-Learning: Putting a World-Class Education at the Fingertips of All Children," issued last month, updates the original goals outlined in the first national educational technology plan (of 1996) with new goals focused less on infrastructure (getting technology into the classroom) and more on how best to use it.

Teachers and parents, if you and your children are involved in Virtual High School, tele-mentoring, or international classroom pen-pal programs, tell us if you agree (or not)! We'd love to hear of your experiences.

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. AOL Time Warner: Honeymoon over already?

    That's what Forbes.com says: "Time Warner must feel like a girl who agreed to marry a guy for his money, found out he wasn't nearly as rich as she thought, and then noticed he's ugly, too. On the other hand, the couple will move into the biggest house in town, AOL Time Warner …. being the world's largest media company." Forbes added that AOL's shares have fallen 25% since the merger announcement a year ago.

    The US Federal Communications Commission this week approved the merger - with modest conditions. One concerns AOL's closed instant-messaging (IM) system. But, according to TheStandard.com, AOL will be allowed to continue blocking users of competing IM services from communicating with users of its AIM and ICQ. Only if AOL extends its instant-messaging services to include multimedia features like video-conferencing would the company be required to open up its systems (here's a New York Times primer on IM). The deal puts AOL Time Warner in "an unmatched position." "None of Time Warner's old media rivals, like Walt Disney and Viacom, will have such easy access to a mass online audience," TheStandard.com reports, adding: "AOL and Time Warner have already used AOL's online system to sell hundreds of thousands of subscriptions to Time Warner magazines."

  2. Girl games

    Makers of computer games apparently have stumbled on a kind of game that females like very bit as much as males do. According to a fascinating piece in the New York Times, the likes of Asheron's Call, Ultima Online, and EverQuest "are set in medieval towns with a knights-in-armor flavor, but characters are not limited to fighting, as in more traditional computer games. They can also chat, buy and sell items like food and weapons, run businesses or make friends and go exploring." The games support community, social structure, and they allow players to "boldly go" where they wouldn't otherwise go in real life (to borrow a phrase from Star Trek). The Times reports that the average player logs on for at least 20 hours a week. Some of them develop real-world relationships with the people whose characters their characters meet in these alternative realities the games create. As you can tell, what makes these games interesting is that they're real-time and Net-based, unfolding as spontaneously as the players' imaginations do. That tells us that Microsoft's XBox, with it lightening-speed processing power, doesn't quite get it (as far as female players are concerned). Sega, with its new Internet service just for games, does. Of course, your comments on any of this are most welcome!

  3. Child porn via Napster, Gnutella

    The file-sharing programs have a dark side that parents will want to know about. According to InternetNews.com, Napster and Gnutella are being used for the large-scale distribution of pornographic videos and software, including illegal child pornography. Law enforcement officials in Munich say the material is disguised as MP3 files. Here's TheStandard's version of the story, and the view from TheRegister.com across the pond.

  4. Teen's computer seized

    The FBI alleges that a teenager in suburban Seattle was at the center of a plan to "take down the Internet" on New Year's Eve. According to the Associated Press (via SFGate.com, the 16-year-old boy an his mother say investigators have blown out of proportion his computer activities and boasting.

  5. Net appliances at home: No thanks?

    Those "streamlined" Internet-only PCs that can fit on a kitchen countertop aren't all they're cracked up to be, according to the New York Times. For details on two such, a writer for ZDNet tells "Why 3Com's Audrey broke my heart" (focusing on how the Net box is problematic for families with multiple email addresses), and a Times sidebar tells how NadaPC's Surfboard comes with no wires, but some strings attached ($60 shipping and a three-year dialup Net service commitment).

* * * *

Share with a Friend!! If you find the newsletter useful, won't you tell your friends and colleagues? We would much appreciate your referral. To subscribe, they can just send an email to subscribe@netfamilynews.org - no need to type anything in the Subject field or the body of the message.

We are always happy to hear from potential sponsors and distribution partners as well. If you'd like to make a tax-deductible contribution or become a sponsor, please email us or send a check payable to:

Net Family News, Inc.
P.O. Box 1283
Madison, CT 06443

That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News


HOME | newsletter | subscribe | links | supporters | about | feedback


Copyright 2001 Net Family News, Inc. | Our Privacy Policy