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Yes, You Can...

...learn to build a website using HTML! And the people of Click Drag Solutions can help with their product, Web Design for Kids. The beautiful thing is this: you need only a computer with Notepad (free with Windows OS) and Internet Explorer (also free with Windows OS), a television, and a DVD player. In our case, our DVD player is our computer, so we only needed the computer!

First of all, let me tell you that I was thrilled to get this in the mail! My husband is a computer nerd, and our living comes from his techno-geek know-how. (You can imagine how I plotted and planned the time he would spend with the kids and this HTML teacher.) So, I was surprised that he wasn't interested in pursuing it when I so gleefully handed it over to him... until I tried to teach it to our oldest child. Unfortunately, our 9-year-old doesn't have enough basic computer skills to make learning this program as easy as it could be, so we aborted her lessons in HTML - for now. As parents, we have allowed our children to use the computer in what we consider to be safe ways, and that has apparently blinded us to all the things we needed to teach her! For example, she didn't know about folders within a computer and the naming and organizing of folders. Had she had even that basic computer knowledge, this would have been much simpler for her to learn. The software actually teaches the basic stuff, too, by the way! We just haven't had enough interest in it yet. I do think that my son is wired to be fascinated with this program... just as soon as he can read past an early-first-grade level!

Having used the program some, I can attest to it being easy to use, simple enough to follow, and quite step-by-step. We were able to pause the DVD at critical junctures (which the DVD actually prompts you to do), follow the step, then play the DVD again when our step was successfully completed. Then you just repeat that process until you have learned the lesson! Calysta built a webpage in her very first lesson!! I was so proud!!

I must say that I was disappointed that my family didn't live up to my dreams of designing websites in childhood, but it wasn't because Web Design for Kids couldn't make it so; we just weren't ready. In fact, if I didn't have to review this product so early in the year, we would probably have a very different outcome!

{You can see what my fellow TOS Homeschool Crew Members had to say about Web Design for Kids by clicking here.}

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