Does anyone know of a site that is safe for kids to create a blog? My DS loves to write and this seems like a good way for him to express himself and have access to his work wherever he goes. Must have parental controls.

Thanks!

Good question. I'd be interested in hearing if you find something. This is generally a tough topic especially surrounding privacy issues with children. I wonder if any of the kids-oriented social sites offer something. I'd think you'd want a "safe" site that does keyword monitoring and what-not.

JB

http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/articles/031606.htm this might help.

My advice is use one of the big blog services like blogger or wordpress. It is easy to set the blog as private and not listed and to set up comments to come to your email address before they are posted. Then your child can share the address with relatives or whoever they choose but it won't come up in search engines. Our child has had a few blogs over the years and it has been a good way to get writing experience.

Update - In addition to posting this question here, I checked with some friends in education and was given the following suggestions that I thought I'd share:

Edublogs (http://www.edublogs.org/) - Based on Wordpress format, I found it to be too complicated for a young child but it does have lots of features.

Weebly - http://www.weebly.com/ lets you create a website and blog

Zoobah http://www.zoobuh.com/ provides e-mail and blog ($1/month I think) - not bad but I could not get the blog to work

We ended up going with Blogger. I think I have it locked down from major search engines and am able to invite specific family/friends to read. I have it set for all posts and comments to be e-mailed immediately to me so I can monitor/supervise. I like it because it is free and there are no ads that can lure him.

It may sound strange, but I guess, ANY blog and ANY site can be safe for a kid, if you have parental controls on + some additional monitoring software installed on your computer. For example, I have blocked access to some internet sites and applications, limited the time of computer usage, so that my son can't play games or surf the web at night (the computer is in his room). Moreover, I've installed ProteMac KeyBag - it's a keylogger for Mac OS, I highly recommend it to all the concerned parents - a great app, records every keystroke. Thus, I have nothing to worry about. Good luck to you! (:

Is there a keylogger for us non-mac users?