Looking for recommendations - Web editors for Kids
Friday October 10, 2008
Before you ask, no this isn't for my son - being only 6 months old, he's not ready to write his own Web page. :-) I'm curious what Web editors there are for children. The only one I could find that was specifically written for kids was HotDog Junior from Sausage.com. Do you know of any others? If not, which ones do you think are best suited for kids, and why? I'd love to hear your thoughts on what makes an editor good for children, especially young children, say grade school aged (under 13 years old). Thanks!
Comments
I do not know about an editor for small kids, but do know that this site is very good and symphatic for very young children to learn to use the computer and webpages.
I’ve been shopping for an easy-to-use, yet powerful web-editor for a while now. I can’t recommend one for kids. Speaking as a 55-year-old computer nerd, I’d say NetObjects Fusion is, by far, the easiest to use. I’m also impressed with EZGenerator, from image-line, for $99. Many teens would like it for it’s cool, highly custimizable templates, the built-in audio-player and image-libraries. If they have a server that supports php, scripts for blogs, podcast, contacts and more are included for free. Namo Webeditor 10 is also very cool and fun to use.
I’d whole heartedly recommend Notepad, or any other simple text editor. Not only is it easy to use (no fancy distracting features) but it teaches the fundamentals of web design right from the start. Children can learn how precise they need to be when using a computer, and gain a solid understanding of how the web works, rather than using a mysterious program that somehow does it all for them. There’s no need to find an easy program for children to use - after all, these are the same kids who figured out how to use the VCR without reading the instruction manual, so HTML will be a walk in the park!
I think it’s doing kids a disservice to give them an “easy” editor. It’s like the transition alphabet that was tried in schools - it only adds an extra and unnecessary step. They should learn html. That way they can be sneaky and look at the source code of other people’s sites and work out how it’s done and all that. It’s how my daughter learnt and what i recommend to everyone. Unless they can afford Dreamweaver, of course!