The Organized Family: Bento to the Rescue

If you are using Mac OS X Leopard, you'll certainly want to take a look at Bento. It's a personal database with an iTunes-like interface. When you load it onto your computer, it automatically enters your address book and calendar information into its database. Those who have used FileMaker will find Bento much less complicated. That's because it's designed for computer users who just want to get the project done. It comes with 20 ready-to-use templates to help you get organized with just about any type of project. Besides working on your Apple computer, it can be used with iPhone and Mac through the Address Book and iCal. Your information can be displayed in a number of ways such as spreadsheet format or form format. It is a great way to keep a sports team organized, your Christmas card list in order and any kind of collection in line. Why not take a tour of Bento or watch the video to see if this product is for you? For less than $50, it looks like a great way for parents without much spare time to get organized or even for kids to keep track of a collection.

Summer Time: How About Some Weather Games?

Weather Channel Kids! offers a nice selection of educational activities for kids including a Weather Center, Weather Education (weather encyclopedia, glossary, resources for kids and teachers), Let's Play (fun ideas for inside or outside) Cool Clips (awesome weather), and Weather Ready (dealing with severe weather, too much sunshine, etc.) There's also a Photo Gallery with albums filled with pictures of sky and beaches, hurricanes and tornados, thunderstorms and flooding, and winter storms. The Games section includes Forecast Earth, Seek and Find, Word Search, Interactive Weather Forecast, Severe Weather Challenge, Watershed Worries, Jigsaw Puzzles, and weather mazes. If you need help using the kids' section of the Weather Channel site, there are guides for you and for your kids, too.

Web Tools for Different Types of Learners

If you are the parent of a child with a learning difference you know how hard it is to find just the right technology resource for your struggling student. One place you might want to bookmark is Christina Laun's 100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner. Laun's excellent list provides links to sites that include mind-mapping, photos, video, charts and diagrams for visual learning; podcasts, presentation tools, auditory tools, text readers, and audio books for auditory learners; and note-taking tools, interaction, bookmarking, and collaboration for kinesthetic learners. Think links like Flash Card Machine, del.icio.us, Audible, Project Gutenburg, PhotoStory, and Audacity, but keep in mind that this list was created for college students, so you'll want to be sure to check the sites before recommending them to your kids. Social networking sites are included.

Is the Concept of Copyright Changing?

Pat Moser, Sidwell Friends School, asked a group of educators, "What's a librarian to do?" and we could stretch that to add teachers and students as well. The confusion over copyright and Fair Use seems to be growing as more and more content is available digitally. Moser wants to know "if copyright laws are destined for oblivion", "if we should feel free to copy and adapt", how authors will be compensated for their work, and "what DO we tell our students about copyright?" She suggests we check out Joyce Valenza's Fair Use and Transformativeness: It May Shake Your World and Harvard's Opt Out Plan as we think about where we are heading. Renee Hobbs, Temple University says, "Copyright is designed not only to protect the rights of owners, but also to preserve the ability of users to promote creativity and innovation." What does that mean to those in the classroom and what does that mean to those producing writing, film, photographs, and other works that may be copyright protected?

Where Are We in Internet Safety?

It seems as if we've been writing about online safety on the Web forever, and even before the Web became so popular we were writing about safety on online services. Are we getting anywhere with keeping our children safe online? Certainly there are more programs to keep kids safe today, but there are also more problems-probably because so many more people are online and kids have learned to get around the safety nets we put out for them. Like drugs, smoking, and alcohol abuse education, we've tried scare tactics, monitoring, and reasoning. With technology, we've also tried filtering. Through it all, we've learned that we (teachers and parents) are the best Internet filters, monitors, and guides for our children-better than any program. One of the problems we face is that kids think they know so much more than we do about the Internet and think we are overreacting when it comes to their safety online. So what do we do? Because we can't watch our students all the time, we have to educate them and hope that they'll make the right decisions when we are not there to watch. What else can we do? Ideas?

Its Mission IS to Help Grownups with Tech Selections

Since 1993, Children's Technology Review (formerly called Children's Software Revue) has been providing monthly reviews of tech products that are targeted to kids. For example, if you are not one who understands video games, the Review will help you decide whether a game might benefit kids at school and/or at home. In fact, this publication, which can be accessed online or in print, takes on all types of electronic media including Internet sites, computer software and DVDs, video games, and interactive toys. Subscribing means you'll get access to a database of over 8200 product reviews and each month will learn about new trends, great Internet sites, and products you might want to investigate for you classroom-or perhaps, recommend for home use. Just download a sample issue to see if the Children's Technology Review would be valuable to you. Be sure to note that the Review doesn't include any advertisements.

Lego® Mindstorms®NXT Zoo Fun

Maybe your kids would like to create a Lego zoo? Legos are no longer just for building skyscrapers and machines, for they can be put together to create alligators, frogs, dinosaurs, spiders, elephants, spiders, and even peacocks. To assist with the construction, Fay Rhodes' book The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Zoo! gives step-by-step guidance for building nine Lego zoo animals. The kids will have a great time learning to program their animals to hop, jump, plod along, move their heads, flutter feathers...  We wonder when they'll be able to make them talk? But the kids can figure this out, can't they? Get those gray cells into action!

KidsClick: WebSearch for Kids by Librarians

When looking for a place to help your children find information they need for reports and projects, try KidsClick. This is a Web search site developed by librarians, who have left their stamp of approval on the sites linked to from KidsClick. The site features 600+ subjects that can be searched by topic, a letter of the alphabet, keyword, and even Dewey Decimal Classification. Every entry gives you and your kids not only a brief description of the site, but also whether it includes illustrations, and what the reading level of the site is. For example, if your kids are researching the topic Bears, KidsClick lets you know that Polar Bears is appropriate for reading levels 0-2 and that Nature: Great White Bear is for reading levels 7+. KidsClick is definitely a site to add to the family Favorites or Bookmarks in your web browser.

What Parents Think & Do When It Comes to Their Children & the Net

Parenting Moves Online: Parents' Internet Actions and Attitudes 2007 features the results of a poll taken by Cable in the Classroom and Common Sense Media. It features information about what parents are doing at home to keep their children safe online in addition to parent attitudes about how the Internet can help their children. Find out if parents are facing the same problems with their children's Internet use as you are with your students' Internet use. You might also be interested in the 2006 poll, Parenting the MySpace Generation.

What Will Spock Know About You?

The founders of new site called Spock.com have set quite a task for themselves. They want to index information on every person in the world. Spock.com says it has already indexed 100 million people and is adding one million names per day on the invitation-only, test version of its Web site, which will be made available to the public in mid-August.  Users will be able to add keywords, pictures and other personal and professional information about people with an internal system on the site to filter out false information that could destroy the Web site's credibility. Each Spock.com user will have an "authority ranking" that can go down if the information provided for a profile is rejected.

You don't have to be an Internet privacy expert, though, to worry about possible abuse. These days, with some people checking things like their credit rating every day, you have to wonder if we all are going to have to monitor what's online about ourselves. Organizations like the privacy rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation agree. "More and more of our lives appear online, or are being organized online," Derek Slater, an activism coordinator at EFF says. "It can be very annoying to see so much of someone online, potentially without putting that (information) online oneself." And, by the way, people search engines have little to worry about legally. As third parties, they are not held accountable under U.S. law for putting on their Web sites information provided by others. Just one more thing to worry about, eh?