Types of homeschool software to enrich your homeschooling

Using software to perform various activities, whether they are work or personal matters, has become one of the prevalent features of the modern society. Homeschooling is no exception from this trend. By taking advantage of various types of homeschool software, you can improve the quality of homeschooling.

You can divide homeschool software into two large categories for the sake of convenience and ease of understanding. First category is homeschool software as contents for homeschool education. This mainly includes educational software and websites. Second category is the software as tools for management of homeschooling. This refers to software for lesson plan or record keeping.

Software as providing contents for the education is an effective aid for homeschooling. Given that most families now have at least one personal computer in their house, using software for homeschooling is quite natural and recommendable.

Educational software has undergone big changes for the last decade.
In early 2000s, education CDROM was used as main receptacles for educational software. Although it was able to contain much data, the cdrom was slow and not very comfortable media.

With the advent of faster and large bandwidth Internet connections, the landscape of digital resources for homeschooling has drastically changed. It is not like homeschool software in CDROM has completed disappeared from the market. However, most software not can be bought on the Internet and downloaded in a matter of few minutes.

Take an example of math. If you do the Internet search for homeschool software for math, you literally get thousands of results for software as CDROM or downloadable packages. This applies to other subjects, too.

A recent trend in homeschool software is that now you have more and more online homeschool software or what we may call web-based homeschool software. If you search for "homeschool math" or "homeschool English" on the search engine, you find a number of dedicated websites on the subjects.

In the past, the contents of these websites could have been recorded in CDROM and sold as homeschool software packages. But these days, you can use them for free, although some contents are reserved for paid subscription.

With these abundant resources, it is now within the reach of any parent to collect decent materials for homeschooling as long as he or she spends time on the Internet searches.

The beauty of these web-based homeschool software is that it not only provides teaching materials but linkage to other resources such as books, articles, and online program for homeschooling.

If the above examples of homeschool software are about contents for education, another important dimension of the use of software for homeschooling is to save your trouble with software for homeschool curriculum management or record keeping.

Unlike homeschool software for educational contents, the software in the category of homeschooling management are limited in number. The names like homeschool solution, edu-track and homeschool tracker are usual search results on the Net.

If the choice of homeschool software to teach actual subjects to children is highly dependent on individual plan of parents, choosing software to manage homeschooling records or plans should be made in consideration of minimum requirements for reporting to the state and keeping the educational records in place for future academic plan of a student.

Homeschool software for record keeping

homeschooling may require quite a large amount of work and effort on the part of parents for several reasons. Using homeschool software can alleviate much of workload as parents are expected to play several roles that have been traditionally those of teachers of the public or private school.

One role is that of educator, which consists in teaching the children. Second role is that of administrator, which means keeping records of curriculum, lesson plans and other type of records that should be submitted to institutions.

Among the two roles, that of educator can be performed with some amount of imagination and freedom. A parent can choose the curriculum, books to read, places to visit for his/her children as extracurricular activities. After all, such freedom of choosing teaching materials and methods is one of the important reasons why many parents choose to do homeschooling instead of public education.

The other role as administrator in homeschooling poses some challenges to parents. Unlike making lesson plans and other contents for homeschool education, the job of homeschool administration or, in other words, homeschool management is check legal requirements for homeschooling to be recognized as legitimate education and produce appropriate documents for reporting.

This is routinized and repetitious work by its own nature. It needs to be regularly checked and relevant information should be recorded. This requires some collecting of information and hence research on what is necessarily monitored is indispensable.

Above all, regulation on homeschooling in your location should be found out. Every state in the United States asks homeschoolers to record and submit a set of information to the authority for legitimate homeschooling. This is not only necessary for compliance with regulations but also for monitoring academic progress of your children and prepare him/her for higher education in the future.

What are the information to be included in such record keeping and submission of the information? For example, with exception of a few states, most states of the United States requires notification of test scores, evaluation of student progress, and etc.

When it comes to retrieving, organizing and transforming a bunch of information into a consistent and manageable format, nothing beats doing them with dedicated homeschool software. Homeschool software comes in many types. Some are a kind of general software that covers organization of homeschooling activities such as keeping records, planning lessons and other education. Some homeschool software are aimed at helping to teach a certain subject like math or language.

Homeschool software, be it general or for an individual subject, can be classified into a commercial software and a freeware. Both types of homeschool software have their own advantages and disadvantages. In the first place, you should not start with the premise that commercial software has better quality than freeware. Some freeware on the Internet is as good as or better than commercial software.

Commercial homeschool software tends to have better customer support such as regular updates and answering questions on how to use the software and troubleshooting. More often than not, commercial software also has better and more functionalities than freeware.

Homeschool freeware has one definitive advantage over commercial software, which is the cost. You pay nothing for it except for the cost for Internet connection and time for downloading and testing it. You may think you have nothing to lose with freeware. But in fact it is not always the case. As for the commercial software, the website of the software usually contains well organized information on the software's functions and what you can expect from using the software.

With freeware for homeschooling, this is a little bit different, some of freeware may have better introduction websites than commercial software but not everyone of them does this. Sometimes, you have to do a long hours of Internet searches to find an exact type of software you want and to check the precise information on the software. Time spent on such search is not monetary cost but an opportunity cost anyway.

Let's take an example of a parent who is searching a good homeschool freeware for record keeping. He or she could type phrases like "homeschool freeware record keeping". With Google, yahoo or other search websites, it is difficult to find a freeware which will allow you to keep records for your homeschooling activities. Most of the search results are not relevant. It is not that you cannot find a software you want, but it takes a long time and even when you find it, it is not certain if the software will work right to meet your needs.

For these reasons, buying well-known commercial homeschool software can be more effective than spending much time on finding and testing freeware for the same purpose.