eGuardian Helps
Woogi World Kids Stay Safe Online
Read what concerned professionals have written about WoogiWorld
The Children’s Way Foundation is the non-profit developer of the virtual community known as Woogi World (www.woogiworld.com). Established in 2008, the Woogi World site is designed to help elementary school-age children become responsible Internet users and goodwill ambassadors.
With its distinctive offerings, and its association with 50,000 schools and 75,000 teachers nationwide, Woogi World delivers a growing audience of children and their parents, and has already become one of the most popular educational and entertainment online destinations available to children.
One of the site’s primary objectives is to provide a creative, safe and healthy environment for exploration and interaction. “When dealing with kids ages 6-12, security is the number one priority,” said Eric Clare, vice-president of corporate partners at Children’s Way. “Because the purpose of Woogi World is to teach children the proper use of the Internet, including not giving out passwords, how to deal with bullying and how to deal with inappropriate language, all of that requires a highly secure and safe environment.”
Embarking from the premise that children are more effective in communicating, and are open to more new ideas when they feel safe, Children’s Way has always been open to new ideas and technology for improving the protection of their young online visitors.
“The technology that was available tended to be of a site blocking nature. We understand the importance of blocking, but we didn’t want to just stop there,” Clare said. “We wanted some kind of verification system for our users that combined the online with the offline.”
It was during a meeting of the California Safety Coalition that Eric Clare first heard about eGuardian, the only online verification service that offers a foolproof method for verifying the age of children. “After my presentation I met and spoke with Nancy Troxell from eGuardian. I found out the company was already established, they already had parents signed up, and they work very closely with schools, which Woogi World does as well, so it seemed like a natural partnership for us.”
With eGuardian, each child is given a unique ID that identifies their age, gender and geographic region (but not their identity) to website partners, instant messaging providers, search engines and email providers. This ID cannot be compromised. As a result, eGuardian makes sites like Woogi World safer for children by limiting contact and interaction to other verified children. It will not be possible for a cyber-predator to pose as a child online.
Once the decision was made to partner with eGuardian, the system was put in place quickly and efficiently. “Our IT guys received the eGuardian package, had a couple of questions that were answered quickly, and then we were integrated within a week,” Clare said.
As Woogi World continues to grow, eGuardian will remain an important part of the site’s future development. “eGuardian is now and will continue to be a major partner in the future. When I go into the marketplace to discuss our fundraising programs, our awareness programs, and our outreach to 75,000 teachers in our Every Kid Votes program, I talk about eGuardian as well,” Clare said. “Now we know our site is a truly safe and secure social networking community for children.”