This is purely informational. I haven’t tried them all, so I can’t say how well they safeguard minors. It’s best to be thorough and try them out properly yourself. YMMV

Ones I’ve tried and I think are good, though not with age restrictions in mind: Wordpress, Blogger, Facebook, Ning, Club Penguin, FreeRealms, Writeboard, 21Classes, PBwiki & Delicious.

RPG = Role Playing Game

Must be at least 16

• Friendster social network

Must be at least 13 and in high school

• Facebook social network

Must be over 13

• Bebo social network
• Blogger weblog publishing tool
• Chamber of Chat Harry Potter multiplayer RPG (no private chat, moderators)
• Gaia Online community with games, message boards etc…
• Hi 5 social networking site
• IMVU chat with friends in 3D
• Jaiku microblogging
• MySpace social network
• Ning social network created around an area of interest (can be open or private)
• Runescape multiplayer game
• Tokbox video chat (works with Twitter & others)
• Twitter microblogging Twitter is now for over-18s. See comments to this post.
• Vox weblog publishing tool
• Weebly website creation tool (includes blogs, forums)
• Wetoku video interview tool (requires parents’ approval)
• Wordpress.com weblog publishing tool
• Writeboard single wiki pages for writing activities
• Xanga weblog community
• 12Seconds video microblogging
• 43 Things microblogging site based around personal goals

Download & install application required

• There virtual world
• Teen Second Life virtual world (13-17 yo)
• vSide virtual world

No Age minimum specified, but require parental approval

• Awol chat, games, diary, friends, & cribs
• Boom Bang chat, make friends and explore a virtual world (moderated)
• Club Penguin virtual world for kids populated by penguins (moderated, ’safe’ chat)
• Endless Online multiplayer RPG
• Graal Online multiplayer RPG
• Marapets virtual pet site with games and chat community
• Neopets Virtual world for pets
• Millsberry Home building community (pre-scripted chat, monitored)
• Sanriotown Hello Kitty games, blogs and forums
• Shining Stars Chatting, naming stars, star worlds (’safe’ pre-constructed chat)
• Typepad weblog publishing tool
• Webkinz virtual pet community (’safe’ chat)

Download & install application required

• Dofus multiplayer RPG
• Eternal Lands multiplayer RPG
• Furcadia multiplayer RPG
• FreeRealms multiplayer RPG (restricted chat, moderated)

I couldn’t find anything definitive about age restrictions on Wikispaces, EduBlogs or 21Classes, but considering that they’re aimed at teachers and learners, I’m guessing that they must be OK for all ages?? I couldn’t find anything in PBworks’ (PBwiki), or Delicious‘ Terms of Service mentioning age either.

As a rule of thumb, when checking out an online tool that you might want to use with younger learners, check the Terms of Service (sometimes called Terms of Use) and their privacy policy. This should be somewhere on the homepage (usually at the bottom). Then do an inline search (hit Ctrl+F) for ‘years’ or ‘guardian’ or ‘13′ or something like that to jump to the bit about age restrictions, and then read the small print.

By the way, blogging tool tumblr. requires subscribers to be over 18.

And thanks to Denis for helping me with the list.

Outliers shows us how good timing, opportunity to practice and hard work are often the most common characteristics of the most successful people. The Element shows how successful individuals are successful usually in spite of their education, a system that often focuses too much on curriculum planning and assessment and too little on nurturing human talent.

The example of the Beatles came up in both books. Gladwell cites how the Beatles had the opportunity to hone their live act, musicianship and song writing through hours of live playing on the Hamburg club scene (at least 10,000 hours is the magic number Gladwell cites). Robinson talks about Paul McCartney’s bad music teacher, and how he and John Lennon would instead mentor each other in their musical development. Robinson focuses on the diversity of talent, engagement, circles of influence and other social phenomena and inner reserves that support creativity and get people into their ‘element’. Gladwell focuses on the timing of opportunities and the advantage we get from being able to make the most of these opportunities.

All in all, a satisfying combination of books that I highly recommend.

The article reports:

Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email

This adds up: we can waste as much as 8 1/2 hours a week if we answer our email as soon as we get it.

I like the reason they offer for why people might feel compelled to check their email every five minutes:

Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, England, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. “Both slot machines and email follow something called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’ which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits,”

Well, it made me giggle.

Now I don’t get any pleasure from email at all. In fact, I avoid it as much as possible. But then maybe I’m just a Misanthrope.

This whole ‘dangers of email’ thing got me thinking about Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero idea: 43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Here’s his video (hour long Google talk about Inbox Zero)

Via Slashdot Slashdot | Why Email Has Become Dangerous

• individual writing
• collaborative writing
• peer correction
• peer policing
• exam practice
• examples of good writing for our classes
• show off your students’ work to their parents
• correct and learn from common mistakes

The tool she’d used for this was 37 Signals’ Writeboard: which is a simple one-page wiki. It allows multiple authors and editors, version comparison and commenting, all the usual wiki stuff – but on one page: “just like a Word document”, Caroline explained.

Caroline took us step-by-step through the Writeboard set-up and then went on to show how easy it is to use. She added that this wiki tool was simpler to use than other online tools like blogs or more conventional wikis, (I reckon because each Writeboard is only a single page). Writeboard’s simplicity is its strength. Because of this, she explained, any teacher or student can get to grips with it quickly.

She gave some tips on what to watch out for when running a wiki writing activity:

• students misbehaving
• comments (Mother tongue, Singlish or target language?)
• difficulties with email invitations

She also gave tips on how to make it work:

• check the Writeboard regularly
• set very clear instructions
• photocopy screenshot with password

Here’s Caroline’s presentation:

Click to download Caroline’s presentation from ICTLT

Billy Tan explained how he’d been testing out Delicious with his General Paper students to help them make connections between issues and motivate them to read more. He showed how students, who had set up their own Delicious accounts, had made connections between different issues within one article by assigning multiple tags to individual articles.

Their exit survey showed that 90% of students liked using it. They found that was an easy and effective way to manage and share online information – all you need is internet access, a browser and to remember your login and password.

Among teachers, their results showed that Delicious allowed colleagues to easily archive and share online resources. Karen Yap showed how tagging makes it easy for teachers to retrieve and organise online information. Their exit survey for these teachers showed that 100% agreed that Delicious is good for sharing, 75% of which strongly agreed.

I asked if they’d had any problems with people tagging this differently or mis-tagging. They said they had. To deal with this they recommended that users agree on how to name tags before setting up a Delicious project to avoid mis-tagging. They added that standardising account names is also a good idea.

Individual or Department Delicious accounts? Both speakers agreed that personal accounts were the best option.

Click to download their presentation from ICTLT.

They also handed out a DVD made by Innova JC called ‘What is New Media?’ which showcases the great stuff they’re doing.

Innova Junior College is the Centre of Excellence for New Media and New Media Arts.

His main point was that these students tend to view (and use) blogs as a means to vent their feelings. He showed us how this manifested in free-form rants, which were far from the aims of his lessons. He confirmed this by showing us the results of survey he asked some students to complete last week.

He was quick to admit that his first attempt at using blogs with these students at integrating blogs into his classes resulted in work that (at best) lacked focus, and (at worst) had these teenagers revealing things about themselves that he was concerned might expose them to risk if the blogs had been in a public space on the web. His blogs were all closed to public access – he chose to use 21 Classes to help address these concerns by keeping the blogs closed and viewable only by his class.

His strategy for dealing with the challenge included setting clearly focused writing tasks, not calling the blog a ‘blog’ in class (instead refering to it as a portal) and starting the blog with very positive and simple writing activities.

One teacher in the audience asked if Nick had used this blogging exercise to explore issues of cyber-wellness and safe practices for minors online. Nick pointed out that he only saw them for two hours a week, so he didn’t have time to explore these issues with his class, although if he had time he would have liked to. It seemed to me that he had already helped his students toward managing these risks by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than those they’d resorted to before.

Here’s Nick’s presentation: