If you have children you probably encourage them to be the best they can be. You want them to learn and grow and be happy. Helping your child create their very own blog could be a great learning experience. Your child will develop their writing and social skills with a blog. If you are wary of allowing your child to blog, here are some great reasons that might change your mind…
1. Develop Their Writing Skills – Some children don’t like to read and write. This might change if you help them set up their own blog. Kids seem to gravitate towards technology at an early age these days. If they don’t find traditional writing enjoyable, the added touch of technology inherent in a blog might excite them. You can help them develop their writing skills by encouraging them to post regularly to their blog.
2. Develop Technological Skills – The world we live in is becoming more and more technological everyday. Many parents feel overwhelmed themselves. You do not want your child falling behind. Having them regularly using a blog will introduce them to the internet, computers, typing and email. All of these skills are pretty much essential, especially for the next generation. There are a lot of pitfalls and dangers incorporated with these technologies so teaching your child how to avoid these early will be tremendously helpful.
3. Develop Social Skills – Having a blog will allow your child to get more comfortable expressing his/her feelings. Responding to comments can also help them develop their social skills. Some kids are shy and might be able to express themselves more fully online. Eventually those skills can translate to the real world.
These three reasons alone should be good enough for any parent who has thought about allowing their children to blog. You need to help them navigate the internet pitfalls, but it will all be a learning experience.
Make sure you monitor your children’s online activities and blog. You also need to talk to your child and explain the dangers of giving out personal information online. Once you have done that, and considering the vast benefits, I think your child having a blog is a wonderful idea.
Internet Safety…
You have to be careful because blogging by children can be dangerous. Follow these four tips and you will make blogging a safe and fun activity for your children.
1. Make Rules: You need to sit down with your child and set up some rules. Whatever rules you decide on you should explain them clearly to your child and explain why they are important. Set some consequences as well, let them know what will happen if they break any of the rules. You don’t want to be lackadaisical when it comes to online rules. Stay firm and your children will understand.
2. Strong Passwords: Make sure that your children’s accounts are all protected by good passwords. “12345″ is not a good password. You should use number, letters and symbols. It might be impossible for them to remember, but if it means you have to log on for them – even better.
3. Screen the Content: Encourage your child to create their blog posts on the computer before they go live. This way you can check them out and ensure they don’t give away any sensitive information, or have any objectionable content. Another bonus with this method is you can help your child get used to word processing software. You can also teach them about grammar and spelling with this method.
4. Monitor their Blog: Check your child’s blog everyday and make sure they haven’t tried to sneak any objectionable content on to it. Also make sure no one has been leaving weird comments. Even some spam comments can have dangerous links so make sure you have access to delete these. Install Akismet if you use WordPress and most of them should be caught. Also check out any links your child puts up, who knows where they could be linking to.
If you follow these four tips you will ensure that your child’s blog will be a great learning experience and not a potential danger. Commit to strong passwords, screening and monitoring and your child can benefit from blog ownership!
If you run a wordpress powered website you have probably wanted to embed a Youtube video at one time or another. Video can add interactivity and excitement to a blog post. Fortunately, WordPress and Youtube make this a very easy process. Centering your Youtube video can be a tricky process though, especially if you don’t know any coding. There is a very simple fix though, that will ensure you can center any youtube video, or any object for that matter.
First you have to get the video into your post. You go to Youtube, click embed (under video), choose your options and copy the code. You then take that code and paste it into the WordPress HTML editor. Remember you have to set to HTML, using the button in top right corner. Then you simply paste in your Youtube embed code. Now you have the video in your post or page.
Once you have that done you can switch back to the visual tab on the WordPress editor. You will see your video (or object) as a large yellow box. Ideally, you could simply click on that box and click the center button on the editor. That doesn’t work. I am not sure exactly why, but it is probably because the center command in WordPress inserts html code that the object doesn’t recognize. Even if you wrap the object yourself in < center > tags it won’t work.
The fix is pretty simple though. You just have to navigate back to the html part of your editor. You won’t see the yellow box now you will see the embed code for the video. Right before the embed code, enter:
div style=”text-algin:center;” (in between html brackets of course)
And then after the end of the embed code:
/div (also in html brackets)
When you switch back to your visual editor you will notice the yellow box is centered! Now that you have learned this code you can center any youtube video or other object in each of your posts. Use it often enough and it won’t be long until you have the code memorized. Try it on your next blog post and let me know how it works.