The summer holidays are well and truly over. If you’re a nostalgic sort of parent you may have harked back to those glorious days of exploring the countryside, and playing with friends until well past your official ‘going home time’. But rather than building rope swings and engineering secret dens, many of you may have found your kids glued to their mobile phones.Yes, the times they really are a changing but, as they say, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. If you’d like to learn more about what you’re kids are up to with their smartphones, we’ve created a handy parents’ guide to the most popular apps amongst school kids with the help of online child safe website Quib.ly. We’re not advocating getting “down with the kids”, but a little understanding and participation can improve online safety and help you to get involved with your children’s’ interests too!
This app allows users to take and send a picture of anything to their friends and connections – then receive images in return. The pictures appear for just 10 seconds and then disappear making it a fun, fast-paced way to share photos. For a lot of parents this concept can sound quite scary. However, if you’re concerned about your kids using Snapchat, the creators do offer a very thorough guide for parents and a service which allows parents to delete a minor’s Snapchat account if you have any concerns. The app also has a child friendly version which can be used by under 13s called SnapKidzInstagramThis is another photography app which is very popular amongst the youth of today. If you’ve noticed your children taking photographs of their dinner, chances are they’re using Instagram. It’s less direct than Snapchat, instead of sending pictures straight to friends, users upload their images to their own online collection where the pictures remain permanently. These photos are visible to all Instagram users by default, but settings can be changed to make posts private. Their parental guide is full of information and support if you have any concerns.BBM
Did your house clickety-click with the sound of frantic texting this summer holiday? Your pride and joy is probably hooked on BBM. This is Blackberry’s chat app, it’s free which means your kids can natter all they want without spending all of their credit (although they may incur web data charges, so watch out for that one!). Users get in touch by sharing each others’ Blackberry PIN codes which means that BBM is a relatively private network of users, though making sure children understand that the information and images they share can be forwarded on (often to their peers) is important. Parents can get more information by checking out Blackberry’s parental guide.WhatsApp
Here is Android’s answer to BBM. It’s another free instant messenger available to iPhone and Android users but, because it isn’t exclusive to Blackberry owners, it is a little more prevalent. The issues are almost identical – you can find out more by reading up on Quib.ly’s WhatsApp chat.
Minecraft
This year’s answer to Angry Birds is Minecraft. This is a nice little platform game in which players design and build a block-filled virtual universe all around them. It’s creative and a lot like online Lego, though without the mess (or the agony of stepping on a rouge brick). It is an all age’s game designed for adult too, so there are more grown up aspects. In single-player mode, however, your child is extremely unlikely to come into contact with these. There are monsters, but any violence is extremely tame – zapped baddies simply turn red and disappear. In fact, in Sweden Minecraft is even part of one school’s curriculum!
