I want to tell you about the YouTube Kids application, designed to entertain children and calm their parents.
Modern children have many ways to access the Internet – computers, tablets, smartphones and even televisions. I think it is not a secret for anyone that there is a lot of very interesting and useful information on the Internet for people of all ages, but there is also a 'flip side of the coin', from which little users of the World Wide Web can learn what they do not need. I will not give examples, there are a huge number of sites / services / videos with content that is completely contraindicated for children. YouTube developers are well aware that preschool children make up the majority of their audience.
The administration of the video hosting actively fights against pornographic content in videos, but the scale of the service is so large that it is impossible to thoroughly study each downloaded video. Yes, and abusive vocabulary on YouTube will not be a problem, there is less violence, but still there. Of course, you can explain to the child that it is not necessary to watch such videos, but this is if he is at a conscious age. Whereas children under 5 years old need to be closely monitored so that they do not recognize too much on the Internet. It is for these purposes that the YouTube Kids application was created.
YouTube for kids
YouTube Kids is a YouTube section that has been moved into a separate application with collections of videos / music videos / cartoons for children. The service was launched a long time ago, but only at the beginning of September 2016 did it fully work in Russia. But YouTube Kids is not just a collection of children's videos, the application has special functions for parents that allow you to limit the ability to watch videos without permission – a password is used for this.
Using the browsing history, you can study the interests and hobbies of the child, this will help to easily find a common language and topics for discussion with him. Using a timer, you can limit the time for watching videos for children, when the time is up, the application will be blocked.
The application works as simply as possible. The parent needs to do a simple initial setup – choose the approximate age of the child, enable or disable search and, if necessary, set a password. The interface is very colorful and child-friendly, there is a pleasant sound and musical accompaniment. The start screen is divided into five categories – 'Recommended', 'Shows', 'Music', 'Training' and 'Kaleidoscope', I will not retell their content, everything is clear from the names. You need to select any video and then a playlist is automatically generated from similar videos. The main disadvantage that I could find in the service is the lack of a version of YouTube Kids for the browser.
I studied the video selections for a long time, used the search, but I never found a video that should not be shown to children. The strangest thing I've come across is backing tracks (without vocals) of songs by foreign rap artists. I'm sure YouTube Kids still have 'non-childish' videos, but they can be removed by filing a complaint about the content of the video.
Conclusion
YouTube Kids is one of the few services I can recommend for parents and their children. I am not touching on the topic of whether you need to give your child a smartphone / tablet / computer, I wanted to share a way to limit children from the negative side of the Internet.
I noticed that many resources for some reason pay little attention to such applications. Will our readers be interested if we periodically start talking about services and programs for children? Thank you for attention.