Techie Homeschoolers

Okay, don’t shoot me.

But remember my last post about the homeschooling web project I was thinking about starting?

Well.  I started it.

And I am having a BLAST!  Finally, I feel that I have freed myself to work on a project that I am fulfilled with online where I can not only help myself (as I learn more about home education myself), but help other homeschooling families.

So that is exactly what I am doing over at Start Homeschooling Easy.

I checked my subscription stats in Feedburner for this blog…and even after about a year being up, I still don’t have more than about 15 subscribers or so…not tremendously big at all (slight understatement)…

So then I don’t feel QUITE so badly about moving.  Once I move officially, I will probably have this site redirect and use the techiehomeschoolers.com domain name for another web project in the future, so it is not a complete loss.

If you want to bookmark my new site and blog, follow me on over to this URL (for the blog):

http://blog.start-homeschooling-easy.com/

Let me just tell you this as a sneak preview (it is going to be even better than this blog – oh, I really hope!!!!).  Here’s why:

• YouTube videos of me and my family homeschooling in action.  Wow.  Can’t get much more personal than that.
• All prior posts and comments from this blog should be shifted over to the new one…so you shouldn’t miss anything (all techie stuff plus other homeschooling topics rolled into one!)
• Lots of different homeschooling topics.  Curriculum reviews (you provide them, in fact! — or okay, I can provide some too…)
• Contests
• Hopefully a PODCAST to come.  I hope, I hope, I hope. That all depends on participants.  Who wants to be on my podcast?  If you’re a homeschooling mama, give me a holla and I will interview you.
• A newsletter. ..and maybe a chat room to come soon.

So, there is more in the works (if I can pull this off)…and why do I want to do this?

Ahh…like I said in my last post, it is a project of a lifetime.  I enjoy meeting people and helping people online – whatever that entails.  For a season in my life it meant website design or helping others with techie projects, or it meant praying with others who met at my christian women’s site.  This is just a new season and a new opportunity and I want to embrace it.

Will you please join me?

Here is the site URL again:

http://blog.start-homeschooling-easy.com/

Hope to see you there.

To all educators:  HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!!!!!!

Whether you teach in a public school, private school, charter school, or home school– ALL educators who TRULY care about our students, are worthy of being thanked over and over again this season.

I know that I am grateful to home educate my two beautiful daughters. It is a blessing from God to be their teacher.

Here’s a little token of my daughter’s thankfulness this season:

Enjoy the your day of thankfulness!

Here’s what I think…

The educational community at large is on the roll when it comes to understanding where we are in the 21st century at keeping our kids on top of learning about technology.  (Pulling off the actual programs to make it happen may be another issue- but to the credit of those schools that are succeeding, I must admit that I have read about some of those schools who are doing a great job at integrating tech and ed in Edutopia).

That said, I think the homeschooling community (of which I am a part) does a good job of remaining open to the unique possibilities available in modern education: distance education, to be exact.  This can only be done through the use of computers, hardware and equipment, plus software which allow for communication between children and teachers who are physically far apart from one another.

Our kids (as well as the parent teachers) must learn how to adapt to and utilize the technology so that we can do the work (for those of us who do use distance learning, and in the homeschool arena there are quite a few).  It would be cool to find a statistic on that.

There is one thing, however, that I want to encourage home educators to pay close attention to regarding technology use, and that’s: not ignoring the potential benefits of web 2.0 and multimedia use in the home classroom.

This whole technology thing goes way beyond the idea of our students being able to look up a few key phrases in Google and do a web search on the virtual library.  It’s also more than the idea of we (the parent teachers) blogging about our students’ achievements (although this can be a real PART of how we introduce technology to our children)…but I believe it is only a small fraction of what web 2.0 has to offer.

Just my opinion–and I am passionate about this topic because I’ve been really pondering this, studying and reading about this topic for years.  Society is moving along, and it’s imperative that we at least offer opportunities for our children to stay abreast of what’s happening, and giving them the tools to learn them.

One of the things I studied in grad school was how online collaboration efforts improve learning in kids by drastic measures.

It’s the notion that a student can take his or her idea, type it up in a document, read it as a script into a computer mic, save it as an audio file, upload it to the web via FTP, create an RSS feed and wrap it in Feedburner, promote it via her own website as a podcast, upload the podcast into Itunes for the world to listen and enjoy…

That is an educational experience.

(And I didn’t yet mention the ongoing blog that could accompany the podcast, and so many other venues that could add more depth and meaning to her experience online, plus subject mastery.)

Which brings up another point: internet safety.

We can’t be teaching our kids how to use all of this stuff without the means to protect them from harmful material online.

What I am advocating is a balanced approach to tech ed.

Just how do we pull it off?

That’s a great question.  I have some ideas, and I’ll keep sharing those in later posts!