I'm not a parent, nor am I kid -- but that doesn't prevent me from appreciating a totally neat iPhone app called 'Kids Eat For' (I guess the domain with 'free' on the end was already taken?)

Basically -- and this is about as basic as apps get -- this app just shows you where the nearest restaurant with a kids-eat-for-free deal. The developers say that the database is kept up to date, with new deals added daily and expired deals removed -- so you don't have to have one of those embarrassing moments when it comes to paying the bill... and you actually have to pay for your kids. Oops.

I guess you'd be able to trade in your iPhone to pay the bill, if it came to that.

Or, wait a second... if you didn't splurge and buy an iPhone in the first place, maybe you could afford to feed your kids proper home-cooked food instead, rather than going out and gorging on crappy ribs and all-you-can-eat wings at the local Armadillo Willy's (what on earth is that?)

At just $3 -- and yes, this is sadly only for restaurants in the USA (at the moment!) -- Kids Eat For must surely be a must-have for all parents. Well, parents with iPhones.

The open source movement isn't just for grown-ups: Open Office 4 Kids is a slimmed-down version of the open source Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org.

The target age group for Open Office 4 Kids is 7-12, but after trying it out, I think there are a lot of adults who would prefer it over MS Office or the full version of OpenOffice. It's available on whichever OS you've set your kid up with: Mac, Windows and (of course) Linux.

Less UI clutter helps make OO4K super-fast. Load times for the app and for creating a new document blew away Office 2008 on my Mac, and I didn't experience any of the annoying lag in loading font menus that I sometimes get in Office.

OO4Kids also has large, very obvious buttons for all of the most common functions of each Office app. The "4Kids" branding is almost a shame, because this could also be Open Office 4 Your Mom Who Always Asks You How To Do Stuff in Office.

On the other hand, I'm glad that any 7-to-12-year-olds who use this app will grow up understanding that Microsoft Word isn't the only way to write a paper.

[via Ghacks]

I have to admit, I'm pretty envious of kids today, because they get to play with fun stuff like Storybird. Storybird is a place for kids and parents to read and create storybooks. It's completely kid-friendly and features a gallery of great artwork that you can use to get started. Just because Storybird is targeted at children doesn't mean it's dumbed-down, though. A lot of adults I know couldn't lay out a storybook in Pagemaker, but they'd have no problem creating something nice with this.

Of course, kids can make their own Storybirds, but they can also read selections from the site's public collection. They're not all great, but the characters in the art gallery are cool enough to hold some interest (I know I would have loved the monsters, in particular, as a kid). Storybird is also looking at offering a print publishing platform, so you can use it to make real books, too. What kid wouldn't want a professionally printed version of his own book?

I don't have a good history with YouTube sites for kids. My first experience was with TotLOL, where I found the selection of videos lacking and had my wits nearly destroyed by that green gummi bear video. Today I decided I had recovered enough to brave the wilds of the kid-vid genre and check out Kideo Player.

I have to admit, it totally won me over.

Kideo Player is curated by a father of two, and his taste is videos is a lot better than the spotty results you get from community moderation. The curator has a stake in the videos he selects, because his own kids watch them. Minimizing parental annoyance seems to be a priority, too: think Sesame Street, not nightmarish gummi bear. The library of videos seems to lean heavily toward educational material: I saw sign language, Spanish lessons, and animal vids when I was watching.

Kideo Player also has a more attractive, more kid-friendly design than Totlol (the dog and cat mascots are seriously adorable), and controls that even a two-year old can use by himself. Hitting spacebar skips to the next video. That's the only thing a kid has to learn to use the site. All in all, this is exactly the video site I would have wanted if YouTube had been around when I was a little kid, and probably the site my parents would have wanted, too.

A reader dropped us an email recently, requesting information on where to find educational software for elementary and middle-schoolers. That's a great question -- there are plenty of Web-based sites to choose from but, as our reader pointed out, it can be tough to find things to put on your computer to use later without an Internet connection.

If you dig around a little, though, you can find a few gems.

Kaboose has a long list of downloads in lots of different categories, including math, science, social studies, and music. Each list is also broken down by age group and operating system (Mac and PC). Several links point to Web sites that only contain printable PDFs and worksheets, but be sure to hunt around for downloadable software too.

The HomeSchool Mom, a popular Web site among home educators has a mile-long list of free educational materials in every conceiveable subject from typing tutors to Forensic Medical studies. Some of the links are for Web-based activities but many take you to sites where you can download free software or send away to receive goodies in the mail.

Adam Smith Academy offers free educational podcasts you can download and listen to on an MP3 player or your computer's media player. Younger children will enjoy stories from Kipling or Aesop, while older kids will love hearing stories by James Joyce or Nathaniel Hawthorne. The site even has a number of history lessons and college lectures available for download as well.

If you're looking for help with specific topics, be sure to check the Web sites of museums and science centers in major metropolitan cities. You could get lost for days roaming the Web site of the Exploratorium, San Francisco's famous science museum. Though much of the information is Web-based and interactive, there are plenty of links to other sites for additional printables and downloads. Budding astronauts of all ages can find virtually anything related to space, astronomy, and space travel at the educational portion of NASA's Web site.

One of the best places to find free and fabulous educational software is within the open source community. Although a few programs require the Linux operating system to run, most will also run on Windows or Mac. Have a look at this comprehensive list to see what's available and what's recommended for students of all ages and skill levels.

Kids get computers. It seems like they take to them almost immediately, once they are big enough to be able to control a mouse. But what about kids that aren't yet big enough? I know both of my boys wanted to bang away on the keyboard from a very young age.

Rather than opening a Word document and setting the font to a huge size, why not run a program that is specifically created for young children? Well, that's what Scot Hanselman must have thought when he decided to create Baby Smash.

Baby Smash is a simple Windows program that will lock out the special keys on the keyboard so that baby can't accidentally exit the program, and will then show colorful shapes with fun sound effects in response to baby's key presses, or more likely key mashes (and slams, and bangs, and mashes, etc.).

Scott is a well-known Windows development blogger who recently went to work for Microsoft. He's using the development of Baby Smash to teach Windows development concepts on his popular blog, ComputerZen.

The internet is full of many wonderful things. However, it is also host to any number to bad influences that parents dread their children being exposed to. Because of this, many companies produce filtering software in an effort to help protect children from profanity.

Glubble's approach is a little different. Rather than make a futile attempt at blocking everything bad on the internet, it uses a whitelist of sites that are ok for kids to see. It brings together a community of parents, allowing the user to set a pre-defined white list and even use the whitelists of other users. It's the same sort of powerful social design that make add-ons like Adblock+ so effective.

Not only is Glubble great at keeping kids' online time rated G, but it also gives Firefox a much more appealing and user friendly look, giving every member of the family an individualized login and portal page, even for the Adults.

Glubble works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can be downloaded directly here.

If you've been looking for a way to get your kids to hate you, we are proud to inform you that the wait is over. It's called Shvoong Homework and it's worse than detention. Calling itself "the world-wide notebook for all your school needs" it fails to actually address any of them.

It begins innocently enough. You sign up for a Shvoong Homework account, give them your e-mail and nickname, and you're ready to Shvoong with the best of them. You are then presented with three options: edit your timetable, edit your notebooks, or connect with your friends that also use Shvoong Homework.

There are so many things wrong with this picture it's hard to know where to begin. The timetable is a virtually worthless feature because kids memorize their class schedule within a week anyway. The notebook feature is an awkwardly implemented document editor and homework uploader (and has a little image of Cartman smiling at you - we suppose that means it's kid friendly). As for the friends feature, supposedly you can share your homework answers with other friends. Great. Have your kids spend their time uploading their homework to Shvoong Homework instead of actually doing it.

And if that isn't enough to get your kids to beg you to punish them with anything, but please, not the Shvoong, then the made-in-2001 design and horrible interface will turn them into straight A students. Oh yes, it's still in beta, but you probably shouldn't get your hopes up.

[via MakeUseOf]

With all the news recently about the giant fiasco concerning toys being created using lead contents, there is no better time to ensure your child's safety. Many parties can have fingers pointed at them in this matter, but let's forget about who is to blame for a second and just make sure that the toys our children are playing with are safe.

SaferToys is a digg like social news site that lists out all stories relating to the safety, recalls, and news on the latest unsafe toys. It's an easy place for concerned parents to check in with and track the latest unsafe toys. Stories can be submitted and voted on so they rise to the top of the news list. Users can also share their insights via comments on each story submitted.

SaferToys uses the Pligg platform, an open source social content management system that lets users submit, vote and comment on stories.

[via ehub]

If your child is out-growing Club Penguin but still too young for MySpace, imbee might be a way to bridge the gap. Billing itself as "the first social networking site for kids," imbee offers safe surfing options for the 8 - 14 crowd and a way for parents to keep an eye on their little social gadflies.

Signing up for a free account with imbee is a swift and straightforward process that requires a minimum of information. Kids must provide a parent's email address which, of course, is easy enough to circumvent but we appreciate the effort.

As a nice added touch, adults can set up their own parent account to access tools that will help them supervise their child's activities. To prove you're an adult, you'll need to either provide credit card information online, fax an information form to the company, or call customer service to provide an address and driver's license number. Although such measures may seem intrusive, it's probably enough to stave off nefarious adults or kids trying to game the system.

Once registered, kids can join groups, watch videos and listen to music, create a blog, upload photos, and send messages to other imbee members. Like similar social networking sites for kids, the more things they do on the site, the more virtual credits they rack up to spend in the virtual store.

Overall, imbee looks like it's shaping up to be a good -- and safe -- place for kids to hang out online. We like that parents can unobtrusively monitor their child's activity and also pre-approve blog posts, profile changes, and so on, if they are so inclined.

After spending some time touring the site, however, it does give off a slight "training wheels for My Space vibe." That's not necessarily a bad thing as long as kids are learning how to use the Internet and sites like this responsibly. We hope, though, that as kids become more accustomed to meeting other children online to play, they don't forget to, you know, go outside once in a while.

So, parents, what are your thoughts on social networking sites aimed at kids? Are they a great way to broaden your child's social circle or collateral damage for kids who already spend too much time online?

[Via ParentDish]

Moms looking for a neat way to meet other mothers to compare notes and swap stories really ought to check out OpMom.com. A cross between iVillage and MySpace, OpMom -- shorthand for Operation Mom -- bills itself as a social networking and web service site for busy mothers. Though clearly in its infancy, OpMom already has sections filled with reader-submitted recipes, theme party ideas, and "circles", groups where mothers with common interests can gather and get to know one another in smaller settings.

Registration is easy and doesn't require users to cough up a lot of personal information. After registration, users have the option of creating a profile with as much (or as little) information as they are comfortable sharing. You can opt to simply provide a screen name for other users to see, or you can detail the ages of your children, your hometown, and even your religious affiliation. Privacy levels are easy to set as well, ranging from full access by all the site's users to only those whom you specifically allow to view your information.

Learning to search the web can be frustrating for children. One simple spelling mistake is all it takes to make a search query useless. Plus, most search engines don't help the user find related information, so they cannot quickly and easily hone their search to find exactly what they're looking for.

Quintura is a search engine that we have discussed previously here, and here. Most recently, they've introduced a beta product called Quintura for Kids, which aims to make searching easier for children. It sports a friendly theme and a few baked-in kid-friendly default searches. Otherwise, in terms of functionality it is very similar to the standard version of Quintura.

In my mind if you're going to market a product to children, it's pretty important to include content safeguards. For example, Google has a setting called "family filter" that attempts to protect young eyes from the impurities of the internet. In Quintura for Kids, I tried a search for the word "Sex", and the related words the search returned included "nudity" and "violence". That made me nervous, but it turned out that the search results shown were heavily filtered and nothing offensive was visible. Kudos! More kid-friendly searches like "Train" or "car" returned tons of interesting options, while interestingly zero results were returned for "nude" and for "Google". The Google one cracked me up.

Hopefully Quintura for Kids will soon be brought out of beta, and have the theme updated, as the holiday theme is maybe a little out of date.

So, you have a hard time convincing the kids that Santa is real? Windows Live Messenger has set up a way for your kids (with your help of course) to chat with "Santa" on Windows Live Messenger (you'll need to download the latest, but there is a link on the page). All you have to do is add Santa's messenger ID (northpole at live dot com) to your WLM contact list and then you can send messages to him and get a reply back. I suppose that this whole thing started because Santa had to become more tech savvy with the times, to be sure he could hack it when it comes to all the new-fangled gadgets the kiddies want these days. I did hear a rumor that Santa and Bill Gates go way back, which is how Santa easily got a spot in Microsoft's offering of holiday cheer, but it is largely unsubstantiated at this point. Heck, simply tell your kids that Santa knows Bill Gates (feel free to link to this post),I'll bet that will make them believe in him for sure. It just makes sense. There you go, a holiday KidHack for you.