An introduction to email for children: fun, safe and tech savvy
There's no question that the Internet is here to stay. How you introduce your kids to the myriad of possibilities available to them on the net can make all the difference between a safe and fun experience or one fraught with danger. Setting up email is a good starting point, introducing them to the electronic world of communications. Kids can send message to classmates, family members, and teachers, communicating quickly and easily, receiving responses in just minutes. Let's take a look at the many ways email for children can enhance their experience of the net, while improving their communication skills tremendously.
Kid's educational sites are a great way to demonstrate the value of email for children. These educational sites invariably provide free newsletters, designed to inform their subscribers and keep them coming back for more. This is a safe way to allow kids to become acquainted with the virtues of cyberspace. Kids learn how to follow newsletter links to additional resources of news they can use, while passing these leads on to their friends.
When setting up email for children who are younger, be sure to monitor sites which send your kids email, and their policies. Ideally, you only want to give permission to sites which promise not to sell, trade or otherwise share your child's email address with any third parties; otherwise, your child will be 'spammed' with messages trying to sell them related products.
When you setup email for children of any age, you can use your ISP's email, or choose from several of the reputable free email hosts, such as provided by Google and Yahoo. All of these have good filtering systems to weed out the unsolicited spammers and questionable emails sent by persons or companies which are not on your child's list of contacts. You can teach your kids how to go through emails that end up in their 'spam' box and mark them, as appropriate, as spam. Your email host will then filter out any future transmissions from that sender. On the other hand, an unexpected email from a friend or relative not on their contact list, may be white-listed by designating the message 'not spam', moving it to the in box and adding that sender to their contact list. Kids will soon learn to manage this task and you can follow up with a weekly or biweekly inspection.
Email becomes much more fun and functional when their email is well organized. Teach them how to create folders to store emails from regular senders. For example, if your child subscribes to a nature newsletter, create a special folder named 'nature' to make those issues easily accessible. Instead of hundreds of messages in no particular order, except by date sent, your child can easily 'flip through' a folder to find message from Grandma, homework assignments and the like, all in an appropriately named folder.
The main danger you need to thwart when managing and setting up email for children is that of fending off those 'third parties, to whom some sites sell email addresses. You almost always have the ability to 'opt out' of such offers. If you can't opt out, don't give your email address! Otherwise, the fun and practicality of email for children is quickly spoiled by hundreds, or even thousands, of unwanted emails!
Now, let the kids jump into what the net has to offer!