I have five children, aged from 5 to 13. They are all pretty tech savvy and we have several computers in our home that they use. One day some type of paper came home from school that was advertising KidZui. It mentioned that it was free to try and my wife and I had been talking about something to put onto the computers to exert some parental control so we decided to go to their website and check it out.
As you will learn about me from subsequent posts, I am fine with a high tech solution and KidZui seemed a little simple to me. This simplicity appealed to my wife, however, and so we quickly had the program downloaded and installed on the two main family computers. I will leave it to you to go to their website and read about all of the features, but I do want to highlight the two basic things it does for us:
- Provide a safe environment for the kids to just explore online. They can search for anything, find appropriate online games and videos, etc. It is also possible to make it automatically launch and require a parental password to exit.
- Notifies us as parents where our children went, how long they were there, etc via e-mail.
My younger kids are very high on this. My 13-year-old and 12-year-old are less enthusiastic since the interface is a little cartoon-like. In the end we did upgrade from the free version to the premium one and my recollection is that it wasn’t too expensive. I let my sister know about it for her four sons; she tried it and eventually updated to the premium as well.
The software is not perfect. Based on the way that it is implemented someone who is a little tech-savvy can easily bypass it (no, I won’t be giving that information away here). It is also limited by the fact that it won’t work with an authenticated proxy server, which I would ideally use in my home network. The last thing that limits it is that it takes full-screen control to keep the kids sand-boxed in the application so older kids can’t use it along with a word processor to do school reports and such. For kids aged 2 to 9 who just want to watch videos and play online it is PERFECT.
Take a look at http://www.kidzui.com
I promise that most of my subsequent posts will not refer to commercial enterprises, but this is the first thing that comes to mind when friends and neighbors ask me the easiest way to let their kids surf without encountering a bunch of garbage.
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