family activities Archives | Page 3 of 6

The best apps for parents of the year: Editors’ Best Tech of 2015

by Cool Mom Staff | Best Apps, Editors' Picks of the Year

Next up in our Editors’ Best of 2015, we’re sharing our picks for the best apps for parents. All of these apps made their debut in 2015 and really do help make our lives as parents a lot easier. Though, the truth is, plenty of these apps are terrific for...

Make your own Star Wars BB-8 and more, with free tutorials from littleBits

by Kate Etue | DIY

To celebrate the release of The Force Awakens — you have heard of it, right? — the team behind one of our favorite tech toys, littleBits, has put together a very cool user-generated #BITSWARS campaign, generating nearly 100 (so far) DIY project ideas...

Guitar Hero Live review: Cool updates put this classic back on top of the charts

by Nicole Blades | Games + Gaming

Honestly, haven’t we all rocked out to an air guitar at some point in our lives? (Or maybe this morning in the shower — ahem.) Pretending to be Lenny Kravitz or Joan Jett shredding the axe and professing our love for rock ‘n’ roll out loud got...

Let the StoryCorps app capture stories of your family’s history this holiday. The result is really beautiful.

by Kate Etue | Lifestyle Apps

When I’m driving around running errands, I usually have NPR on the radio, unless I’m listening to Spawned, of course. The stories that almost always end up with me in tears, searching for a Kleenex in the console, are the reports from StoryCorps which...

7 simple tips for taking photos at night, so your Halloween photos come out scary good

by Nicole Blades | Photography, Tips and Tricks

Calling all you ghosts, pirates, zombies, superheroes, and that small army of Queen Elsas — it’s time for your closeup. Because one of the best parts of Halloween for us, besides stealing our kids’ fun-size Snickers, is getting photos of the kids in...

Sling TV: Is this affordable cable alternative worth considering? A thorough look.

by Liz Gumbinner | Entertainment

I finally sat down and took a good hard look at my cable bill and…whoa. When I consider that there are probably only 4-5 cable channels I really watch, aside from premiums HBO and Showtime; I do pretty much all my watching on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Instant...

Calendar apps for a tech house divided? Reader Q&A

by Nicole Blades | Productivity Apps

We are a house divided. My husband is an Android user (but I love him anyway), and I am an iPhone user. We need a calendar app that works with both, allows for the importing of Google calendar an iCal and automatically refreshes it. Is this a possibility?...

Brain Games: A must-see series that will blow your parietal lobes

by Liz Gumbinner | Entertainment

I have no idea why I have never discovered National Geographic’s Brain Games before this weekend. But as my kids browsed Netflix yesterday — and I prayed for anything not animated — my seven-year-old paused on Season 1, asked if we could watch, and...

Family Staycations: 6 tips for making your time at home almost as big a deal as your time away

by Nicole Blades | Tips and Tricks

Sure, Spring Break is cool when you and the family are jetting off somewhere fun, but what about those of us who decide to stay close to home? Are we not entitled to enjoy some rollin’ good times, too? Short answer: Yes! Indeed, we are. So I’ve put...

$Making math fun: 8 ways to help get teens excited about math$

Making math fun: 8 ways to help get teens excited about math

by Cool Mom Staff | Tips and Tricks

If you have a teen in your household, as some of us do, you’ll know that their math homework is getting much more challenging and sometimes (we’ll admit it) frustrating. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways for making math fun in really...

NEW: The podcast that helps you be a savvier digital parent in under 15 minutes a week

Hi! We’re Kristen + Liz

Kristen Chase + Liz Gumbinner of Cool Mom Picks

We started Cool Mom Tech in 2010 to help make our increasingly digital lives easier, more organized, more meaningful, and more fun, however old your kids may be.

We love that it's grown to become the go-to source for millions of parents who want commonsense info about tech delivered with a smile.

We even have the privilege of sharing our tips + tricks with The TODAY Show, CNN, HLN, GMA, Nightline, newspapers and magazines around the country, and our favorite -- regular parents who stop us at PTA meetings and ask us how old kids need to be to get a smartphone, and whether they really need to panic about Snapchat.

(Answer: It's complicated.)

We're so glad you're here! And we hope we can help you too.