I came across an article from the BBC titled “Virtual worlds threaten ‘values.’”The substance of the article is based on film-maker Lord Puttnam’s keynote speech at the Virtual Worlds Forum.

Puttnam expresses concern about children “think[ing] of themsleves as not much more than consumers” noting that many of the virtual worlds for children are created and run by toy makers. Unfortunately, the BBC article doesn’t go into the substance of Puttnam’s arguments, but anytime a politician starts talking about morals you can expect a lot of hot air. However, Michael Parsons, writing for the Times Online, was impressed by “how evolved Lord Puttnam … [was] in [his] understanding of the scale, scope, and importance of this new medium.” I would be very interested in seeing the full text of Puttnam’s speech, but I haven’t had any luck finding it online.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been getting various notices about two new MMORPGs for preschool children by Disney and Nickleodeon. The first notice that I found was on paidContent.org. Then a couple of blog postings announcing the new services and pointing out that they aren’t anything new. All this buzz left me wondering a couple of things.

Didn’t Disney Just Buy an MMORPG for Kids?

Yes, they most certainly did: Club Penguin for $700 million. Club Penguin is for children aged 6-12. Disney’s new offering, Bunnytown, will tie-in with a Sunday-morning puppet show for preschool children.

What’s Roy the Zebra?

Roy the Zebra is a reading site for children that centers on a group of animal characters. The main feature of the site is the nine-part story of Roy’s escape from a zoo and search for his herd. There are also a lot of interactive reading games using the characters introduced in the story, and Roy-themed songs.

What’s ICT Games?

ICT Games (Information and Communications Technologies Games) provides games to teach elementary reading and mathematics; however, the reading games are also appropriate for children learning English as a second language.

What ICT Games Does Well

The games on ICT Games are both fun and well-focussed on specific learning objectives. There are a lot of games that help children practice spelling, basic letter sounds, and blends (combinations of letters that produce a single sound).

One of the strengths of ICT Games is that many of the basic actions in the alphabet games trigger associated sounds. This gives children still learning to read important practice remembering which sounds go with which letters.

What’s Kindersite?

Kindersite is a directory of online English and Spanish games, stories, and songs for children aged two and up.

The resources that they feature appear in a frame through Kindersite. Better-known publishers include the BBC, Harper Collins, and PBS Kids.

What Kindersite Does Well

Kindersite gives children a safe way of finding online games, stories, and songs across a number of different sites. The directory covers a large selection of the best online games, stories, and songs.

What’s Storyplace?

Storyplace is an interactive website designed to provide children a virtual library. The site is split into two parts: the Pre-School Library, and the Kindergarten Library.

Storyplace is designed for children who speak English as their first language, or speak a different language at home, but live in an English-speaking country. However, it is useful for students in non-English speaking countries as well.

The Storyplace website was created by The Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg County and is supported, in part, by book purchases generated through the site.

The ability to show animations synchronised to sound and text has a lot of potential for creating interactive ESL reading resources for young children under 8.

There are even some advantages over reading together with a parent (but please don’t stop reading with your child):

• The child can control the pace of the story.
• The child can choose to review parts that catch his or her imagination.
• The animations are timed to match the words giving children more clues as to the meaning of the words.
• In an ESL setting, the interactive resources provide audio spoken by a native speaker.