iPad Kids

Periscope, YouNow and Meerkat: How to keep kids safe

By Emily On June 8, 2015 · Add Comment

Confession time: I still don’t fully understand how to use Instagram. There’s an unwritten protocol of use and luckily I don’t have kids who use it, otherwise I’d have no idea how to monitor their activity. It was enough of a learning curve trying to figure out our iPad Restrictions so that my sneaky kiddos didn’t find workarounds – I can’t imagine how much more hair I’d lose if I knew my kids were active on photo-sharing and live-streaming apps. The newest crop of share-everything-about-your-life apps available for the iPad include the wildly popular Periscope, and the less talked about but still potentially kid-unfriendly apps Meerkat and YouNow. These apps allow users to video stream in real time, and watchers can comment without content filters. Sure, used within the right context these apps can be very cool for the right audience. In fact, the kids and I recently watched an important [...]

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App Review: My Little Pony – Cutie Mark Chronicles

By Emily On June 5, 2015 · Add Comment

It might just be my own weirdness, but I get really excited when my kids show interest in characters that I loved growing up. It started with Sesame Street (but when does it not amirite) and as the kids have gotten older they’ve started watching My Little Pony and Care Bears thanks to franchise reboots intended to modernize the brand. I’m still waiting on my son to be ready for Harry Potter chapter books, but until he is I’ll keep regaling him and my daughter with amazingly boring stories that start with “Oh wow, when Mommy was a kid she watched this too!!” Of all these reboots it seems to me that the My Little Pony brand has been the most popular. Walk through any store that offers children’s products and tell me you don’t see something, at minimum just one item, that’s covered with the bright cartoon horses. There are [...]

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Easy guide to setting up Parental Controls (Restrictions) on your iPad

By Emily On June 4, 2015 · Add Comment

So my 7yo son has this new thing now. Apparently he wants this thing called privacy and frankly, I’m not quite sure what that is. If I don’t follow him like a hawk he will be figuring his way around the iPad and certainly trying to watch something he knows he shouldn’t. Before I figured out how to set up Parental Controls on the iPad I was totally the Bad Cop; now that I’m not a helicopter I’ve been promoted to Moderately Restrictive Cop. At this point, ‘ll take what I can get. For those of us who share a family iPad, it makes a lot of sense to set up different profiles for each user. (If you haven’t already done this, we’ll feature a post tomorrow about how to set up profiles.) Under each profile you can customize the settings, which means Little Billy won’t rack up $500 in [...]

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iPad App Review: Mystery Word Town (Updated)

By Emily On June 2, 2015 · Add Comment

The last 6 months or so have been a whirlwind! We’re nearing the end of the school year, and when I look back I’m amazed at how far my 7-year-old has traveled academically. This is a child that, at the beginning of the school year, could neither read nor write. He also couldn’t identify half of his lowercase letters (and don’t even get me started on sight words). It should be mentioned that he has an autism spectrum disorder that has made learning a bit of a tricky process for him. That said, he’s now reading at a 2nd-grade level and writing up a storm – according to him he’s even in the process of authoring a book about natural disasters. Because he’s not a traditional learner, my son really appreciates educational apps that provide an element of fun and imagination. This helps keep my somewhat unfocused early reader engaged [...]

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