Have you seen that Microsoft commercial with the adorable little Asian girl who uploads a picture from a digital camera, edits it and sends it off in an email to her parents? She then ends the commercial saying, “I’m a PC and I’m four and a half.”
The first time I saw that commercial I thought, “Wow, my kid is way behind the curve here.” My daughter loves to pound on the keys like a minuscule Liberace, but she’s a long ways away from navigating her way around an operating system. That being said, I was very interested to see what she thought of KidZui, a web browser/social network built especially for kids and their safety-conscious parents.
Like the Webkinz website and Disney’s Pixie Hollow, KidZui provides a virtual environment in which children can interact with other children. Unlike the other two services, KidZui makes straying into dangerous territory very difficult for junior web surfers. Add to that some superior parental monitoring tools and you have an great piece of internet software capable of providing hours of safe webutainment for the young ‘uns.
Available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, KidZui is best described as one part Facebook and one part web browser. Once installed, your child gets to create an avator or “Zui” that will represent her in the KidZui environment.
Once your child has created her Zui, it is then your turn to set up the parent account that will allow you to monitor your child’s online activity.
When we logged in to KidZui for the first time, my daughter and I didn’t quite know where to start. The colorful, flash driven environment had a lot going on with the menu bar on the left side of the screen seeming to provide the main gateway to most of the web content. My daughter, being three, was content to simply click click click the mouse until she hit on something that appealed to her. Being three, just about everything in KidZui appealed to her, especially the videos.
Kidzui is incredibly layered, with one menu leading to another and another and so on. Each menu category is split up into three tabs; web, photo and video. The web tab pulls together a group of websites pertaining to whatever category you choose. All are family-friendly and safe for kids. There is spot at the top of the page ot enter in your own URL if you wish to navigate outside the sites KidZui has provided. Just for fun I typed in Google’s address and was told it was considered an unsafe site but that my parents could add it for me. I then typed in the address of my blog and was told I had found one KidZui had yet to review. They still stopped me cold.
Most of the videos seem to be pulled from YouTube and my daughter instantly fell in love with this short piece from the Vancouver Film School. She asked to watch it over and over so I decided to add it to our favorites. Except I couldn’t figure out how. Favorites and adding friends are two areas that aren’t quite as intuitive as they should be.
The best part of KidZui has to be the parental controls. Once your child logs off you have the opportunity to log into your parent account and view every website and bit of media your child accessed. A paid membership expands these parental controls as well as adds more options for your child to express herself through the KidZui website.
Overall I’m very impressed with KidZui and I would love to hear your thoughts on it as well. And if my humble request isn’t enough to get you to the KidZui site and try it out for yourself, Ill bet the prospect of free stuff will. The folks over at KidZui are sponsoring a contest asking bloggers to share their thoughts and create some buzz. The louder the buzz, the greater our chances are of winning. Kidzui is offering a six-month free paid membership and a $250 Nordstrom’s gift card to the blogger who:
- receives the most comments on their KidZui post
- receives the most insightful comments
- creates the biggest discussion about KidZui on Twitter
So this would be where you all come in because you can’t win unless I win and I can’t win unless you help me win. If I do win, I’ll be sharing half of my winnings with one of my readers.
So here’s what you have to do.
- Download KidZui from this link.
- Try it out with your kids. Have some fun with it.
- Come back here and tell me what thought of it.
- Post the following to Twitter: RT @heathernoah Visit http://tinyurl.com/brt3pt for your chance to wind a Nordstrom gift card and a free 6 month KidZui membership! #kidzui (make sure to include the hashtag)
- Lather, rinse, ReTweet as often as you want between now and when the contest ends on February 28th.
Good luck and have fun with KidZui!
