I am always concerned about my children’s safety online when using the internet and about the content they may see. After watching the Cnet Loaded news video for today, I was happy to see that there is a new web browser and parent dashboard designed for kids online safety. It is called zoodles and is a safe online service that adds a learning and fun element.
Zoodles allows parents to create a profile for each of their kids that can be monitored and configured on the parent dashboard.
Zoodles has put together a selection of games that are displayed on the child’s profile for fun and educational learning. These games are age appropriate and are updated as your child gets older.
Zoodles is free with a basic membership but is currently offering a premium one year membership at a discounted price of $29.95 which is normally $60.00.
I have signed up for the one year membership and am going to give it a try.
I’ll keep you posted.
My Observations So Far
Well, after having yesterday and today to get a chance to look around the zoodles platform, I was able to formulate some first impressions.
Simplicity of setting
First thing I noticed was the simplicity of setting up the zoodles platform to work on my mac os x computer and Windows 7 computer. All I had to do was login to the zoodles website with my created user name and password (created with I registered for the service). I was then taken to the parent control access area and was able to setup profiles for both of my kids within 2 or 3 minutes.
Loading the Zoodles Program on Windows and Mac OS X
To load the program on each computer, I just logged into the zoodles website, clicked on play games, the system asked me to allow adobe to be installed, I agreed and about 1 minute later the software was loaded and ready to be used. This step only has to be completed once on each computer since the program can be loaded after the install by clicking on the zoodles program icon.
Parent Controls
Another thing I am impressed with is the parent controls that the system has built in such as:
- the ability to promote specific educational subjects for each child,
- ability to control the type of games shown on each child’s profile,
- ability to set different levels of action/violence limits in the games,
- ability to block specific content,
- ability to add content such as access to a specific websites,
- and what I like most of all is the ability to set time limits.
I set the time limit of half an hour for both my kids and when that limit was reached the system displayed a message telling them that their time had expired for the day to come back tomorrow.
Progress Reports
The parent section also displays information about each child’s usage and progress reports.
My kids are really happy to be using the system and have said, “Thanks Dad” a few times now.
Overall
I like what I see so far from the Zoodles platform and content managment system.
About Troy McQueen