Monday, June 05, 2006

The next Bill Gates???

Ok, I've blogged before about Kyra's emerging tech savvy, but she crossed the line of all I've blogged about before over the course of the past week. A couple days ago, she hopped on the computer and after a couple minutes, we heard music playing. We thought she'd opened iTunes by chance and randomly started up a CD. How wrong we were. Mac has a feature accessible from the desktop called Spotlight that is basically a search feature that searches for your keyword throughout your entire computer and pulls up everything with that word in it, whether it be in the middle of a Word document or an email you have in your inbox. Well, we discovered that Kyra had clicked open Spotlight and typed in her name. Spotlight pulled up everything in the entire computer with her name in it and displayed it for her to peruse. So she had quite a few pictures open and was currently watching a movie of the kids that Steven had made, which was where the background music came from. What 3 year old opens up a computer search engine and does a search on herself??? That cracked us up. So today, I was making dinner and Steven was snoozing on the couch after work. I called to them that dinner was ready, and Kyra replies, "Hang on, I'm doing sometin' on here." I chuckled and assumed she had opened up one of her games and was in the middle of playing it. After a couple minutes of nobody making any indication that they were coming to dinner, I went into the living room myself, woke up Steven, and noticed that Kyra was playing a game on the Playhouse Disney website. I smiled and asked Steven, "Did you log onto Disney for her?" He looked at me, still a little groggy, and said no. We both kind of looked at each other for a minute, then looked back at her in amazement. We then set about to figuring out how on earth she got onto the Playhouse Disney website because although she's becoming quite the little typist due to internet chatting with my parents, we both know for a fact she can't spell something as long as 'Playhouse Disney.' I was especially confused because yesterday, I had taken the internet browser icon off her desktop to prevent her from getting on the web unsupervised.... Yeah, that almost worked. I'm going to have to be smarter than my 3-year-old. *sigh* Anyway, we asked her how she got to that website. She goes into this long monologue that went something like this, "Well, I clicked switch user and got onto my account and then I clicked Mini HD (kind of like the PC start menu) and clicked 'Users.' Then I clicked 'Kyra' and then I clicked 'Sites.'" We were doing all of this as she described what she'd done and ended up with a dummy webpage, but it was in a legitimate web browser. She couldn't remember what she did after that, but we surmised that somehow she'd gotten the address bar highlighted and must've clicked the 'D' key, which would pull up past webpages because Disney.com was the first 'D' page to come up. Then all she had to do was hit return and off she went to the Disney site. All of that makes perfect sense, except for the fact that it was done by a 3-year-old!!! Steven and I were just wide-eyed and laughing, but more than a little concerned. She had been surfing the web for at least 1/2 hour without any supervision, which can be a recipe for disaster at any age. I made a joke before about having to get internet parental controls for my preschooler, but now we're actually going to do just that. Holy cow!

3 comments:

Aidan said...

All of a sudden, I feel rather incompetent!

Arlene Kasselman said...

Do you think she could come over and help me set up links to other blog friends on my blog page. I have tried and tried and can not do it.

This could be a rather bold hint to either her Mom or Dad to help me do it...Ahem....

Steven J Bruce said...

And you call yourself a mac user! That would be Steve Jobs. :-)