Family Picks

Reviews

Honest reviews of products that pair well with what our books teach — devices, apps, and tools we've actually tried.

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FROM THE AUTHOR The Chatbot Crisis: How AI Companions Are Failing America's Teens, and How Big Tech Is Rigging the Rules Meant to Stop Them

The Chatbot Crisis: How AI Companions Are Failing America's Teens, and How Big Tech Is Rigging the Rules Meant to Stop Them

★★★★★ 5/5

Author's note: I wrote this one, so read this as a note from the author rather than an outside review. After 25+ years in cybersecurity and years of teaching kids online and AI safety, I kept seeing the same gap: AI companion chatbots are talking with teens every day, and the safeguards around them aren't keeping up. The Chatbot Crisis is my independent analysis of where these apps fall short for teens, and how Big Tech is shaping the rules meant to stop them. If you're a parent, teacher, or anyone who cares about kids and AI, it's written for you.

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The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Eight Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning

★★★★★ 5/5

I used The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Eight Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning to help my children build online safety skills and think more carefully about what they see on the internet. The book made it easier to teach them how to spot weak arguments, misleading claims, and logical fallacies in online content. It also helped introduce basic logic in a way that was simple and engaging for them to understand. Overall, it was a valuable resource for protecting my children online while strengthening their critical thinking.

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Santa and Me: The SCADA Before Christmas

★★★★★ 5/5

Being in the critical infrastructure cyber field, I found this book helpful for explaining my work to my children in a simple, engaging way. It gave me a shared language to talk about online safety, logic, and how to think carefully about information they see every day. The lessons made it easier to connect my job to real-world examples they could understand. Overall, it was a useful book for turning a complex career into something my children could relate to.

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OPEN SOURCE & FREE

KeePass Password Manager

★★★★★ 5/5

I use KeePass to create and store all of my passwords in one encrypted database, protected by a single passphrase that I only have to remember once. Every account gets its own long, complex, unique password, but I'm not stuck trying to memorize any of them. I keep my KeePass database file saved in cloud storage and backed up, so it stays safe even if something happens to my computer, and I can open it on my iPhone whenever I need a password on the go. It's a free, open-source tool that's been around for years and is well documented, and it's made managing strong passwords across my whole family's devices simple instead of stressful.

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PARTNER Outschool — AI for Kids Classes

Outschool — AI for Kids Classes

★★★★★ 5/5

With AI tools showing up in classrooms and on kids' phones faster than most curricula can keep up, Outschool's live, small-group AI for Kids classes are a good way to teach kids -- much like Cyber Elementary does -- how AI chatbots and tools actually work, where they fall short, and how to use them safely and critically, all taught live by vetted instructors in small groups. It pairs well with the online-safety habits we teach at Cyber Elementary.

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