Surely children and pets go together like .. well, jelly and peanut butter, a horse and cart, strawberries and cream? ….. but that’s not always the case. When children and pets are with each other you might be led to believe that whilst your kids aren’t made of snips and snails, they have been created to pull puppy dogs tails. And to tease sleeping cats, chase flocks of pigeons away from the crumbs someone’s scattered for them and squash stranded worms on the pavement.

Regrettably young children and pets don’t naturally interact well, toddlers often see animals, like other objects in the house, as toys to be manipulated for their own entertainment. The long ears, tails, fur, feathers or other interesting features make yanking, tugging, squeezing, squashing and chasing them even more enjoyable.

But because toddlers see this kind of behaviour as fun, that most certainly doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable. After all you want your children and pets to get along together so you’re going to have to teach your toddler respect for animals. Not teaching them to be kind to their pets can have a negative effect on both the children and pets – many creatures have no defence against curious toddlers or alternatively an animal who can defend itself may do so. Try the following to begin to teach your child empathy with and respect for animals:

Find different kinds of animal friends

If your toddler meets different kinds of animals in different settings, they will begin to feel more comfortable around them. Make sure that the owner is present though, and happy for your child to interact with her animals – safety is of course paramount when children and pets are together. Never, ever leave your toddler unsupervised with a pet, no matter how docile you believe that creature to be.

Books

These are a great place to find new animals to introduce to your child. Start with simple books with large, easy to distinguish pictures of familiar animals. Then move on to more exotic and unfamiliar species. Toddlers particularly enjoy books about baby animals or about children and pets like themselves and their pets, which will including animals they are familiar with. Visit my website Scruffy’s Bookshop for a good selection of instantly downloadable animal stories.

Teach your child the art of petting

When children and pets are together, the child’s natural response is to smother the animal with their own particular brand of love. You are responsible for showing your child how to safely pet an animal. You can begin by using your toddler’s collection of stuffed animals to paractice on. “See, this is how you pet Rabbit, gently and slowly, just how he likes it.” Or for even more fun, get your child to pretend he or she is a baby animal that you can pet gently. If you’re feeling really brave, then you can pretend to be the animal yourself and let your child pet you!

Explain that it hurts

Tell your toddler that animals have feelings too, and that tail pulling, ear pulling, kicking and squeezing will hurt the animal as much as it would hurt them. Be very firm with them and absolutely clear that such actions are completely unacceptable.

No teasing

When children and pets are together they often want to play. But what a child sees as an enjoyable game, may in fact be teasing the animal. Teasing animals is not only unkind but potentially dangerous. Actions such as waving a bone out of a dog’s reach or pretending to eat from its bowl may bring about an aggressive reaction from the animal.

Of course children and pets do get along together, and once your child has learned respect and love for the animals in his or her life, you will have laid the foundations for them to enjoy lifetime of happiness and love with members of the animal kingdom.

Multimedia is media that uses multiple forms of information content and information processing like text, audio, graphics, animation, video, interactivity) to inform or entertain the audience. Multimedia also refers to the use of electronic media to store and experience multimedia content. Multimedia is similar to traditional mixed media in fine art, but with a broader scope. The term “rich media” is synonymous for interactive multimedia. Multimedia means that computer info can be represented through audio, graphics, image, video and animation in addition to traditional media (text and graphics). Hypermedia can be considered one particular multimedia application.

Multimedia finds its application in various areas including, but not limited to, advertisements, art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics, business, scientific research and spatial temporal applications. Below are the several examples as follows:

Entertainment and fine arts

Multimedia is heavily used in the entertainment industry, especially to develop special effects in movies and animations. Multimedia games are a popular pastime and are software programs available either as CD-ROMs or online. Some video games also use multimedia features.

Multimedia applications that allow users to actively participate instead of just sitting by as passive recipients of information are called Interactive Multimedia.

In the Arts there are multimedia artists, whose minds are able to blend techniques using different media that in some way incorporates interaction with the viewer. One of the most relevant could be Peter Greenaway who is melding Cinema with Opera and all sorts of digital media. Another approach entails the creation of multimedia that can be displayed in a traditional fine arts arena, such as an art gallery. For the most part these artists are using materials that will not hold up over time.

Education

In Education, multimedia is used to produce computer-based training courses (popularly called CBTs) and reference books like encyclopaedia and almanacs. A CBT lets the user go through a series of presentations, text about a particular topic, and associated illustrations in various information formats. Edutainment is an informal term used to describe combining education with entertainment, especially multimedia entertainment.

Engineering

Software engineers may use multimedia in Computer Simulations for anything from entertainment to training such as military or industrial training. Multimedia for software interfaces are often done as collaboration between creative professionals and software engineers.

Industry

In the Industrial sector, multimedia is used as a way to help present information to shareholders, superiors and coworkers. Multimedia is also helpful for providing employee training, advertising and selling products all over the world via virtually unlimited web-based technologies.

Mathematical and Scientific Research

In Mathematical and Scientific Research, multimedia is mainly used for modelling and simulation. For example, a scientist can look at a molecular model of a particular substance and manipulate it to arrive at a new substance. Representative research can be found in journals such as the Journal of Multimedia.

Medicine

In Medicine, doctors can get trained by looking at a virtual surgery or they can simulate how the human body is affected by diseases spread by viruses and bacteria and then develop techniques to prevent it.

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Have you toyed with the idea of a building a multimedia blog? Well not to be rude, but it’s about time! Admit it – a text-based blog is boring. No matter how information-rich your posts are, they’re just text and the last time we paid attention to any of it, text didn’t exactly throw us into any sort of exciting frenzy!

With today’s technology, there’s really no reason why you can’t turn your blog into a virtual entertainment center complete with video, audio, instant messaging, and more. This article describes a couple of the multimedia tools we’re talking about just so you can get an idea of how you can turn a Plain Jane Blog into a screaming wild ride of thrilling exhilaration.

Internet Video

Online video takes multimedia to the max and quite often, making it available from your blog can be a simple matter of installing a plugin or pasting in a small piece of javascript code. YouTube offers thousands of free videos like this for example, but if you want to make your presentation truly unique, you’ll need to make your own little movies. Most of today’s cameras (and some cell phones) can turn anyone into an instant movie maker and if you’re not camera shy, you can record yourself using a product that you’re selling, you can record yourself explaining a particular technique, or you can simply record yourself giving a speech.

If you **are** camera-shy however, you can record your computer screen instead. Thanks to a sweet and free screen-capturing program called Camtasia, you can make videos of yourself using software like Microsoft Excel or Word with or without audio and text bubbles. If you’re a software developer, you can make training videos and teach your users how to use your programs while you’re sleeping!

Internet Audio

Offering audio on your blog is another great way to satisfy today’s multimedia-crazed society — especially since we’re all naturally attracted to sound more than we’re attracted to text. With audio, you’re presented with a couple of options. You can offer streaming audio, which is live audio broadcast from a radio station or even from your own home. Or you can offer recorded files. Many blogs will play a recorded audio file as soon it’s loaded while others let visitors download a collection of files.

Either way, audio gives you the opportunity to offer an earful of business-related speeches, lectures, or interviews and increase the interactivity of your blog at the same time.

Instant Delivery vs. Archived Delivery

If the truth must be known, immediacy is what makes multimedia most effective. Streaming video and audio is much more exciting than their recorded forms because they’re LIVE. It gives visitors the feeling that they’re “right there” inside the action and that they’re part of an important event.

If offering your own streaming information isn’t a feasible option for you right now, offer some of the free streaming videos and audios that are already available. You’ll find a ton of relevant subjects ranging from software and computer topics to sewing and fishing hobbies. Just be sure that you keep your visitors’ capabilities in mind when offering these tools.

You don’t want for example, to overburden your visitors’ computers by forcing unwanted downloads. Always give your visitors the choice of listening to an audio file or watching a video. Believe it or not, a significant portion of the Internet community still connects via dial up. These users for instance, won’t appreciate having to download a ten megabyte audio file before your blog completely loads — especially since it can take dial up users up to half an hour before that download is even finished!