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New look, new content, new site.

The idea is to have the kids make their own site.

Now that they are older they should be able to interchange info and befriend other kids on the net.

I have asked Andie to write her own pages and Sunny has helped me choose the material for his space.

I need to do some surfing now and see what the best teens sites are doing to help me decide what sort of direction we should be pointing Scotskids toward.

The worries people have about kids online are understandable but there is so much that they can learn from the internet and I do believe that for the most part the negative side is that most adults can't be bothered to learn how to use computers properly. And who can blame them as it is a time consuming business. I do think that children need to be carefully monitored when accessing the internet. It's a whole debate I have struggled with for years now and I could bore everybody to tears with the arguments and put them off the internet for life.

The truth is that you only get what you want out anything if you put the effort into learning how to use it properly. While the kids are on the net you must regard them as being in a danger zone and it makes sense to be with them or to be there to guide them through any difficulties and know who they are meeting up with. They also need their own freedom of expression however and hopefully pages like these will allow them that.

It's interesting to note that I found lots of very good links to French language programs through the need to edit some French entries scotskids received. It has given me the way forward for links on scotskids. We should be giving children links to all the good sites we find but because of our need to protect children from getting onto the internet at large via scotskids we will make a cool links page that has the urls of the sites we like but they will have to be copied into the browser address bar by the user. This will allow older children to share links to interesting educational sites without opening up the browser to the internet at large. It's unfortunate but I will have to remove the live e-mail links too as this is already becoming a source for too much junk mail. No-one will ever be able to directly e-mail Andie or Sunny as I monitor all communication to scotskids to protect the children's' privacy. Anyone contacting scotskids can be assured that their email address will be kept private.