Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Social Networking for Kids

In looking for information on social networking I began to visit sites like MySpace and Facebook. My question was, "Are there any other sites that are appealing to a younger demographic?". We looked at sites such as Club Penguin and Whyville during classtime, but I stumbled upon a different one I had never heard of. Imbee.

This is the original article I found about the site.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/06/28/imbee-social-networking-for-youngsters/

After reading this I decided to visit the official site for imbee, which ironically had a link for teachers to use imbee with their students. There are 3 lesson plans listed there with puposes like making online friendships and creating their own profile. There was one about learning to question their virtual friends to ensure they are who they say they are which is a much more important lesson. Here is the link to the Teacher page.

I began to create my own account, but stopped when they started asking for credit card information. The site is free for teachers to use, but they do charge a $1 fee and then refund it automatically. Since this was my first time navigating this site, I opted to stop there.

1 comment:

Industriouskid said...

Hi there,

Thanks very much for posting about imbee.com.

As one of the founders we purposely designed imbee.com to keep our young members safe. That’s why on the front end we require a credit card (no fee is charged) to authenticate the parent and then by proxy, their child. Next, we are the only social network to provide a built-in parental control panel – which means mom or dad can set age-appropriate parameters related to their child’s content development or communications activities. Parents can see every blog post before it’s published, every message before it’s sent and they have 100% approval on any friend request made to their child. Next we keep all of our members content private – that means you can’t search for a profile / personal information using Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine. We also don’t’ support search within imbee.com. We facilitate what we call “controlled scope of publishing” that means that kids only publish or share information with others on their approved circle of friends list. Finally we actively monitor all public groups within imbee.com.

As you can see with all these layers or security, it’s virtually impossible for someone with devious intentions to connect to our kids. Parents are involved. We are involved and we provide more tools and layers of security than any other social network or virtual world. I hope this post helps to clarify what we do in terms of keeping our members safe.

Tim D
Founder, imbee.com