Misait is a social network for children that shares and builds knowledge through both educational and entertainment content, created and supervised by a team of educators, psychologists and psychopedagogues. Its objective is that people get rich in the meeting and discover that social networks can facilitate learning and development.
We are a free tool that so far the schools were hiring external providers, which made it only accessible to a restricted group of centers. Misait is comparable to an intranet with two substantial improvements: on the one hand, which is also a huge external social network, and on the other hand, it is updated alone at no cost to users, explains the head of the Department of Communication of Misait, Lucia de Francisco.
Children from 6 to 14 years old, educators, parents, schools, associations and companies committed to education can participate in the network. Changing cards, sharing school work or consulting a teacher while doing homework are some of the activities that children can develop.
We understand that the educational change we are experiencing is aimed at transcending the physical space of the classroom and complementing it with the real scenarios of the current environment of any student, recognizing that knowledge is no longer the exclusive property of the school but that it is accessed through multiple paths and enriched, prioritize creativity as an indisputable value, recognize that human development is not reduced to acquiring knowledge and reproducing it, betting on values such as researching, collaborating and forging a autonomous thinking, says the communicator, in statements to Positive News.
The system offers users an open and private chat, a personal blog to create and share concerns or knowledge, family activities, music, leisure, games to explore the environment and other aspects of reality. For example, the Development Assistance Aid Foundation has recently become part of our community. The entity has a series of online children's games that, except on their own platform, had never hung before in other spaces. Misait is the perfect space, because children can access them and even, if the application allows it, play online while other social networks a priori should not have users under 14 years old, ”he says.
As for the applications offered by the Web, De Francisco has commented that children use "mainly the wall and photo sharing tools", teachers value the tools that allow sharing documents while parents are inclined to "the shared wall in which they see their wall and that of their children ”.
The own content published by users in Misait is shared with the Creative Commons license, which respects the authorship of the creator while allowing free access to it.
Francisco has clarified that Misait "does not intend to compete with what already exists but to cover territories that have not been able to enter other networks, mainly because these networks do not have an ethical code that allows certain types of potential users to use them" .
Care for the safety and privacy of children is closely monitored by their creators: before you can register a minor, you must register your father or mother, who becomes the account manager. Once the registration is confirmed, it is recommended to configure the relationship and behavior filters deemed appropriate.
The network does not include advertising with links to websites that do not belong to Misait or its collaborators. Likewise, users can report inappropriate behaviors within the platform and a Technological Research Brigade (BIT) will investigate inappropriate attitudes or words among minors, as well as conflicts that could eventually occur within the tool.
The creators of Misait are a group of friends and parents of children of different ages that after several discussion sessions concluded that the dangers of social networks for children comes from the hand of “the absence of limits, values, criteria or regulations adapted for Internet use by minors ”.
A social network for children that is committed to education
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(Image: Courtesy of Misait)
