Are your kids Webkinz-ed out this summer? Probably not. As Larry Magid writes, sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz are very popular with kids and provide a fun way to learn how to social network with lots of limits.

But if you'd like to steer your kids to some websites where some other kind of learning could possibly take place, here are a few to check out. Now, I know they may not want to hear your suggestions. It's akin to handing them the school's reading list and saying, "Here are some really good books to read!" But plant the seed, and they may just move their mouse to one of these sites before summer ends.

Scratch -- This is a web site designed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab (in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education). It's for kids ages 8 and up, who can creative interactive stories, games, animations, music and art by moving "building blocks'' around. In the end, they are designing their own computer programs, but the interface is so simple it turns coding into an online Lego-like, building-block exercise. I told my kids about this last year, and my son remembered and was tinkering on the site this week. He moved from there to wetpaint, where kids can build free wiki websites, to build a website about his favorite baseball team.

Invention Dimension -- If your kids are interested in inventions, here's another site from MIT that turns the history of some pretty big inventions into trivia and games. From there, kids can dig as deep as they'd like into how to bring an invention to reality.

National Geographic Maps -- This "Find the Sunken Treasure" game is a good way into this site, which has everything you'd want to know about every kind of map. If games are the best way to pique your child's interest in geography, then check out this National Geographic Kids game site.

Just a few sites to offer kids a break from their usual online haunts. If you've found some other educational and fun websites that your kids actually like, let us know.