children

'Heckerty' stories come to life on tablets, phones (podcast)

Heckerty, a 409-year-old green-faced witch, can't seem to get anything right, but fortunately she has a loyal cat named Zanzibar who comes to her rescue. The iOS and Android app, Meet Heckerty, is based on a series of stories by Anne Rachlin. They are narrated by Rachlin's daughter Jan Ziff. Ziff, whose daily radio show Sound*Bytes is heard on CBS Radio News stations, is a longtime broadcast journalist with stints at the BBC and Voice of America (Disclosure: CBS Radio News is owned by CNET's parent company CBS and I also broadcast for CBS News).

There … Read more

Who was Steve Jobs? New kids book aims to answer

"Who was Steve Jobs?" may not be the easiest question to answer. But a new book from Penguin is tackling that topic in a kid-friendly way.

Written by Pam Pollack and Meg Belviso, "Who was Steve Jobs?" is aimed at children 8 and older.

A small portion of the book posted on Amazon reveals a simple approach. It begins: "Steve Jobs always loved machines. His father repaired machines for a living. As a child, Steve loved to watch his father build and fix things. When Steve grew up, he started a company that built machines.&… Read more

How Facebook fights child porn

It's hard not to be affected by an article titled "Kids Raped, Sodomized on Facebook Pages," the first of a four-part WND series about child porn and Facebook.

The article alleges that the blog "located dozens of child porn images after 'friending' many likely pedophiles and predators who trade thousands of pornographic photos on the social network."

Unlike legal "adult pornography," child porn depicts sexual exploitation of children, in some cases very young children. Child porn is illegal in the United States and many other countries. Anyone who knowingly produces, transmits, stores, or … Read more

Adoptee finds himself on missing-children Web site

It's inevitable when you're adopted that, at some point in your life, you'll try and find out as much as you can about your birth parents -- who they might have been, who they might have become.

For software salesman Steve Carter, 35, that time seems to have come when he decided to have kids of his own.

He knew he'd been adopted from an orphanage in Honolulu when he was 4. As he thought more about his past, he saw the story of Carlina White, who went on a missing-children site and discovered she had … Read more

Google exec: It's parents' job to protect kids from porn

It is always stimulating when an executive from Google tells us something about, you know, life.

Recently, we've had Sergey Brin explaining that it is surely better to trust Google than governments. Or, um, Facebook and Apple.

Yesterday, it was the turn of Naomi Gummer, who is a public policy analyst at Google in the United Kingdom. Her declaration was a simple one: It isn't Google's responsibility to ensure that kids aren't confronted by online porn. That falls to the parents.

The way the Telegraph speaks of her speech to a conference of child welfare experts, … Read more

Mobile apps reshape toys and learning

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--While older generations simply had to memorize facts at school, today's children and young adults learn best by playing, often with digital gadgets, according to experts at the Sandbox Summit.

Held at the MIT Media Lab, the conference brings together educators and technologists seeking ways to better reach Generations Y and Z--groups ranging from toddlers to 20 somethings--and equip them with skills for the digital lifestyle of the 21st century. In additional to making compelling online games and educational content, they are also trying to design toys which bridge offline play with online apps.

New technology, particularly … Read more

'Socially assistive' bots to help kids read, exercise, and more

What if kids with special needs had their own robot to work with them every day in school, guiding them toward long-term educational goals that develop not only their cognitive and social skills but also healthy habits such as exercise?

A team of 17 principal investigators from Yale, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Southern California think that with their expertise in computer science, robotics, educational theory, and development psychology, they can do just that.

So does the National Science Foundation, which just handed the team a $10 million Expeditions in Computing award -- one of the agency's largest … Read more

One-fifth of third-graders own cell phones

Cell phone owners are getting younger and younger. According to a new study, 83 percent of middle schoolers, 39 percent of fifth-graders, and 20 percent of third-graders have a mobile device.

Stephanie Englander of Bridgewater University conducted the study (PDF) for the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center. Her research consisted of interviews with 20,766 Massachusetts students, in third through twelfth grades, with the goal of seeing whether readily available technology plays a role in cyberbullying.

The study shows that not only do younger kids have cell phones but also more than 90 percent of children are online by third grade. … Read more

Nonprofit's 'Kony 2012' viral video stirs emotion, controversy

If you're on Facebook, chances are a link titled "Kony 2012" has appeared on your news feed this week.

The video, which was uploaded to YouTube on March 5, tells the story of filmmaker Jason Russell's personal mission to take down Joseph Kony, the Ugandan leader of the guerrilla group Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

Produced by the nonprofit group Invisible Children, it has all of the elements of a powerful viral video: heroes and villains, heart, purpose and a call to action (the filmmakers also make good use of Facebook Timeline as storytelling tool). In … Read more