Web Publishing Tools for Kids?

fuzbuh asks: "I want to help an 11 year old who wants to publish a site for kids, and am thinking about what tool(s) to provide for her. Her experience is limited to email, web browsing (on kid sites), and computer games. This, as a first step for her, needs to be easy, and more focused on content than form. What do people suggest for tools for her? A web based page builder (which one)? A WYSIWYG editor (may be a bit complex). A 'Wiki' where only she can edit? Maybe I should just start her with a blog to post her ideas and stories. What have others done? Any ideas and/or suggestions? Thanks in advance!"

Comments

Depends on what the kid's interest is.

[dalutong]

When I was 11 I was already familiar with many WYSIWYG editors. I had moved on to doing HTML and Javascript coding. I knew some basic C. I had taught it all to myself because I was interested in it.

If I had only been interested in the content then I probably would have been satisfied with a WYSIWYG editor.

So figure out what her interest(s) is/are. If she wanted to know how to do web development, then let her start poking at teach yourself HTML guides online while she plays with some WYSIWYG editor. If she is only interested in publishing, however, then have her start planning what she would like her site to look like, have her start writing the meat of what will be on the site, and then teach her the basics of a WYSIWYG editor.

If she wants to have embedded blogs, then it's time to at least teach her the basics of the web and of HTML, PHP, Perl, or whatever else might be included in the blog software.

Sorry I can't give you a better answer. I can only say, "it depends on her interests."

The Same Thing You Would Use

[ONOIML8]

I see some folks on here have mentioned Dreamweaver. I don't think I would want to purchase something when I could do it for free and keep the content free, and I want to teach my children the same. I also don't like the whole product activation thing.

My 8 year old boy has started doing his own site using Mozilla Composer. There are some tools on the web, counters and such, that generate HTML code and he's learned to cut and paste that code into his document. When he does he reads the code and tries to understand it, asking questions along the way.

There are plenty of ways to create web content, kids can use any of them. They will suprise you and you might even learn something from their work.

Note that we don't have a Windows based system anywhere in the house. Imagine a child, probing his/her way around the computer in the learning process. Tried that, got tired of fixing broken computers because the kids had screwed something up. My kids, 8 and 6, learn on their own Linux computer. I've had to do less sysadmin stuff to that box than most of the machines at work. They experiment along, lots of trial and error and theres no big panic when they screw something up. Both boys find themselves at home now on Solaris and FreeBSD machines too.

So let the kid use the same tools you would use.