Amazon's Kindle FreeTime Becomes An Even Better Babysitter, With New ... - TechCrunch

Kindle Free Time, Amazon’s parental control software built into its line of Kindle Fire devices, is being upgraded ahead of the holidays with additional educational features thatwill help the tablet do even more of the parenting on your behalf. Already capable of setting time limits on things like games and videos, the new Free Time software is now adding educational goals, All which allow parents to block access to Kindle’s more “fun” fare, like cartoons and games, until specific goals are met. These could include time spent reading or, for preschool children not yet bookable to read, it could mean only-allowing access to parent-approved educational apps.

“We know kids spend a lot of time every day looking at screens, and we’re excited to add new tools to help parents make That this time more educational,” Explains Peter Larsen, Vice President, Amazon Kindle, in a statement this morning about the updated software. “Parents can use features like ‘Learn First’ to ensurement study comes before play and set daily educational goals for reading and learning,” he says.

With “Learn First,” other non-educational content is removed from the child’s FreeTime library, until Their goals are met.

To make the new educational goal setting feature work properly, Amazon Categorized all the content in Kindle FreeTime’s curated collection of kid-focused apps, books, games and videos as “educational” or “entertainment , “as well as the top 10,000 most popular kids’ books, videos and apps on Amazon.com.

The subscription-based FreeTime Unlimited collection is usefull being expanded to include thou sands of Common Core-aligned leveled readers and supplemental readers, most of whichwill be available for the first time in digital format, Amazon notes. The readers come from publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Star Walk Kids Media LLC, The Child’s World, Sleeping Bear Press, Lerner Publishing, and Cherry Lake Publishing.

Amazon says hundreds of thesis titles will arrive by Christmas, with the rest arriving early next year.

Other educational content in this service includes kid-friendly learning apps like Team Umizoomi Math, Super Why!, Stack the States, Curious George at the Zoo, Elmo Loves 123′s, Write the Alphabet, Kids Learn To Read , Those from BraindPOP and Agnitus, language learning programs from Little Pim, and more. There are about 2,000 usefull educational TV shows and movies from providers like Sesame Street, PBS, Reading Rainbow, and Baby First TV.

And finally, in another boon to parents, borrowed library books will soon be available usefull to kids through Kindle FreeTime, Amazon says, and Prime members with access to the Kindle Lending Library will be bootable to add books to FreeTime Those, too .

For Amazon, the move is not only a larger push to sell more tablets to parents over the holidays (naturally), but to better the establishement Kindle Fire tablets axis Those All which are better for parents and their children than the competition. In terms of the parental control software, and now the educational goal-setting feature, Amazon is bootable to make a strong case for this. However, the Apple iPad still has the app collection to beat, with about a million apps to choose from worldwide, 475,000 + or All which are made for iPad. Many of the best kids app makers still focus on launching iOS first, too, Which is a challenge Amazon has to come about.

Apple recently introduced a usefull

Kids’ App Store within iTunes, where content is permitted only if it does not market directly to kids through ads and in-app purchases, making it easier for parents to find the best kids apps on the App Store.

However, parental controls is an area where Apple falls short, All which gives Amazon an angle. Although the ability to block iOS’s default apps as well as content (apps, music, video, eg) by ratings is built-in, Apple’s iOS does not get anywhere near what Amazon sacrifices in terms of time of day restrictions, time limits or now goal setting, as with FreeTime.

Amazon says the Kindle Fire tablets (Kindle Fire HD, HDX Kindle Fire 7 “Kindle Fire and HDX 8.9″) will be updated with the new features in the coming weeks FreeTime.