What was that funny thing your daughter said this morning?

You’ll never remember.

Was it your son or daughter or other daughter that said, “Are bees born in flowers?”

Who can remember that when you can’t even recall what you had for dinner the day before yesterday.

 To capture these and other memories, set up an email address on a free service, like Gmail or Yahoo-mail, for each of your children. If your son’s name is John Smith, you may have to get a little creative because JohnSmith@gmail.com is most likely taken. Adding a middle initial or middle name may do the trick.

Now that you have the email address set up, just lob in an email when you want to remember something, and here’s where the fun begins. You can send emails from your computer or your phone. From work, home or on the road. When something fun happens or when you’re thinking of something that makes you smile. Send pictures too. Don’t forget to give the email addresses to grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles. You can even send voice recordings and videos. Don’t limit yourself. Take advantage of the gigabytes of space available and before you know it, you’ll have a wonderful chronological listing of special events, detailed thoughts and unforgettable messages.

children email gmail yahoomail

What a great idea right? Build a tough camera that little Johnny or Janey can bang around. Make the buttons really big and colorful. Add some camera games and snap, you have a kids camera. Oh, you forgot about the taking picture part. 1.3 mega-pixels. Plenty, right? Small, fuzzy LCD’s. No problem right? Wrong. 

While looking for a digital camera for my children, I found two that led the pack and were available everywhere, the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera and VTech’s Kidizoom Digital Camera. Both were fun and colorful. Both offered 1.3 mega-pixel resolutions and both were built “kid tough.”  This all sounds good, but after looking at specs and reading all the reviews, I have concluded that both are so bad that I’m going to wait until next year. Basically it came down to this. The Vtech Kidizoom takes horrible pictures. Just awful. And, the Fisher-Price, while its picture quality was slightly better, had design flaws such as an easy way to delete pictures, lousy LCD, and gender specific coloring.

This year, Santa is going to have to find something different to put under the tree. Hopefully the picture will be bright and clear next year.

To see an in-depth review complete with sample pictures, go over to ZRecs.com.

Cameras children gadgets kids Product Research

You may have heard about this project, the $100 laptop for children? It turns out the goal of creating a durable, functional, and usable laptop really ends up costing a bit more, but at $200 the XO is still revolutionary.

This is one of those projects that takes two big, hairy, audacious goals and drives them together to create a revolution. Each goal, in and of themselves would be amazing accomplishments, but when both happen together, the resulting revolution will change the world.

The goals are simple: 1) A $100 laptop. 2) A laptop for every child. Of course, the two work hand in hand, but separately, they have ramifications that will be felt for decades and together will change lives, the computer industry and the world.

As you review the features, think about how they will impact a child somewhere in the world, maybe in a classroom, maybe in a handmade house, maybe in your own living room.

• 3.2 lbs.
• Waterproof, dust-proof, drop proof with a handle
• Viewable in total darkness and direct sunlight
• 2 watts power consumption results in very long battery life and many different charging options including a hand crank
• 1GB flash memory
• WiFi networking
• Mesh networking - XO’s can detect other XO’s and piggyback off each-other to gain network access and share documents and files.
• Word processor, calculator, PDF reader, programs for music, chat, painting, and some games
• Built in camera and speakers
• USB connectivity

Please learn more about this project at www.Laptop.org. You can also learn more at NYTimes.com.

children gadgets

The latest version of Firefly flyPhone, yep, the one designed for children, has great features but still suffers from poor call quality. So says PC Magazine.

children gadgets kids Phones

Looking for a site where the kids can play a “Beach Clean Up” game? How about an animated lesson on cloud formation designed by NASA?

With links to 1200 educational and reference sites, the newly redesigned Kids.gov is best used as a portal to get to other sites as opposed to a site to find answers to specific questions.

children education games kids Website