Internet Safety News
Award-Winning Sites by/for Children Announced
by Anne Collier
Web sites that teach, inspire, empower, and connect kids around the world are what the London-based nonprofit Childnet International looks for when it receives nominees for its Cable & Wireless Childnet Awards.1 Below is a sample of the recently announced finalists for this year's awards.
- "Froguts" a site created by a U.S. teacher and self-taught web designer where kids can learn how to dissect (virtual) frogs, thus saving the kind that really hop.2
- a site by students and teachers in Reunion3 (an island west of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean) that proves geographical "isolation" means nothing on the Internet.
- an Australia-based web site by three teenage sisters4 that allows kids worldwide (50,000 of them so far) to build and publish their own web sites, showing how professional teen web designers can be.
- two web sites that engage child activists in worldwide children's rights. The first is the Sweden-based "Children's World"5 in Swedish, English, and Spanish featuring former street child Asfaw Yemiru of Ethiopia who is winner of the 2001 World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child. The second one is a virtual "Children's Parliament,"6 the brainchild of a teenager in Hong Kong.
- UK-based Hammersmith and Fulham Young Carers Centre's site7 for and about children who, at a very young age, need to care for parents and/or siblings.
Descriptions of all the finalists, as well as commended sites, are accessible in English, Spanish, and French. Childnet describes them as, "having exciting and realistic new ideas for projects using the Internet that would make a real difference to the lives of young people."
The awards program attracted 161 entries from 38 countries. The 11 finalists will receive cash prizes and a trip to Paris in April 2002 for the Cable & Wireless Childnet Awards ceremony, when the winner of each category will be announced.
Examples of sites that received commendations include an Egypt-based site that connects people involved in scouting across the Arabic world;8 a 16-year-old's U.S.-based site about career-planning that includes video interviews with leaders in six fields;9 a Belgium-based school site10 that asked the question, "How many famous Flemish writers, artists, or politicians can you name?" of 7,000 schools worldwide and published the responses; and a France-based project to produce a special journey through which blind and partially sighted young people can travel together and share their experiences by together creating a special audio-enhanced web site.
1Cable & Wireless Childnet
Awards, www.childnetawards.org/english/index.html.
2Froguts.com, www.froguts.com.
3College les Tamarins, www.ac-reunion.fr/pedagogie/cotamarp.
4MatMice.com, www.matmice.com.
5Children's World, www.childrensworld.org/wcpswe/engindex.asp.
6Children's Parliament, www.visimpact.com.au/childnet/.
7bubblycrew. Hammersmith & Fulham Young
Carers Project, www.bubblycrew.org.uk/.
8Makhmakh, http://163.121.12.48/.
9StreamingFuture.com, www.streamingfuture.com.
10Flanders' Historical Ambassadors, users.belgacom.net/ambassadeurs/.
Anne Collier is editor of the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter and president of NetFamilyNews.org a nonprofit news service for parents and teachers of online kids.
