Review of Home School, Inc PER (3.5/5) or "Another Crack at the Planner"

As you know, the Moodle thing was a no-go for our family.  Again, not through any fault of the program, it just didn't seem to be able to scale back to the single Middle School student.  For the past month I have been auditing the completely FREE planner at Home School, Inc which is completely internet-based (you can reach it from any computer).

To get started, you will need to register a school login with Home School, Inc.  Then you will register another user for the teacher/parent, and a user for each student.  This process is a little irritating and I would recommend using a single password for the school and for the students.  Each time your student logs in, they will first log in to the school and then select their name and log in AGAIN to get to their account.  Depending on the ages of your student, this can feel like a lot of passwords to remember.  Fortunately, most browsers support saving the school username and password which should be relatively safe if you are using the same computer at home.  

Once you, the teacher, are logged in click on the link for the "Planner" and get started.  There is some very easy to follow set up dialog for your School Info and School Term.  Here my recommendation is to keep the terms SHORT, five to ten weeks at max to allow for changes in interests or schedules.  It is very easy to copy the courses from one term to another so keeping the terms short actually alleviates extra work instead of creating it.    Once you have a term and at least one student, it is time to set up those courses.  You can use the "Make A Plan" interface which will guide you through the process or go straight to "Courses at a Glance" for a faster interface.  

Creating a Course is self-explanatory.  You should select a grading method.  - for us it is usually complete/incomplete - but, if you use a grade-driven curriculum or have a child that thrives on numbers, do what feels right to you.  Even if you choose the complete/incomplete options, you will have an opportunity to grade specific assignments or record comments on a topic.  You will also need to choose a time for each course, this really doesn't mean that you have to do it then; however, you should really estimate how long each topic takes in a day so that you can get an accurate picture of the time spent in school (especially if you live in a state with an hourly attendance requirement).  Most of our core subjects take about an hour +/-.  Once the Courses are created, you will add coursework and assignments to it (again, this is where shorter terms will be easier).  There are good Template "tricks" for making incremental lessons or repeating the same task each day.  When all your courses are ready to go, it is time for the student(s) to take a crack at it.

The student will again log on to the school account first.  From there, they should click the link for the "Planner" and then select their username from the list and enter their password.  The student will be taken directly to their "School Today" screen.  This terrific screen allows the student to see what their tasks are for the day and "Do Work".  Clicking on the "Do Work" tab opens a dialog box for that subject and once they have completed their tasks for that subject, sends the work to the teacher/parent for review.  This screen also shows the student any past due work from earlier days and what work is still awaiting teacher review/grading.

Again as the teacher, you will log in and see work that is needing your review.  If you have set the course or assignment as requiring a grade, you will fill this in as you complete your review.  You can also make other comments in this dialog box or review your student's feedback.  "Bad handwriting", "Only 12 minutes to complete timed worksheet!", "Read from p.394 to 437", "Boring video, Mom" are some of the comments that we have left for each other on our assignments.

Overall review of Homeschool Inc PER is 3.5 out of 5 stars.  I like the interface, the dual log in thing is irritating though, especially for younger students.  It is FREE which is a plus, but that comes with the big MINUS of ads which are continually scrolling around the right hand side of the screen making the program sluggish at times.  The internet based planner can be used from a Mac, PC, or *Nix computer which is a real draw in our family, but I'd also like either an offline syncing interface or export with iCal or some mobile app.    There are also many customizable reports, Skip-A-Day, and Field Trips which were simply too much to cover in this post (so I will cover them next time in a couple of weeks).  

Nothing Personal - Why Moodle didn't work out for our homeschool

I really liked Moodle. It was highly organized and powerful; but it just wasn't for us. I found my son still wanting a paper planner. He was going into Moodle and printing out his calendar daily which seemed like a complete waste. Since most of our assignments were offline (with the exception of the Science Wiki that we collaborated on in Moodle), he just would not get in the groove of going to Moodle to check his assignments.

What I can see from our Moodle experiment is a sense of the real challenges of classroom management. As homeschoolers who live and work with our students 24/7, I think we often poo-poo the amount of work it really takes to be a teacher in this age. The amount of work that went into designing the course, making the assignments, setting up the quizzes, then recording all the grades was overwhelming with just one student - I really couldn't imagine 25 students of varying abilities all needing this level of attention. I see now why Moodle is used heavily at the university and high school levels, but rarely earlier - to design and maintain 6 courses yourself in the online environment is nearly impossible.

I am glad I did the Moodle thing for a while. I enjoy learning new things and I can see uses for Moodle beyond the classroom - I can imagine offices using the powerful Moodle elements to set their Employment Handbooks and Continuing Education in an internal server. I plan to revisit Moodle, deploying in an external server, with some of my math tutor students; but, for now, this homeschool is going back to the paper planner in hopes of finding something simpler to administer for the single teacher/student.

Using Moodle in the Homeschool Environment Part 1: Installing Moodle

The new school year is upon us and I am always trying some new trick to get organized and get my son working more independently. Recently, some of his homeschooled friends have switched to the online public charter school K12. While that environment is not for us, I do see some advantages in the child's ability to work at their own pace but still have obvious assignments and deadlines.

What Moodle can Provide:

1. A detailed schedule (even for the whole year)

2. Deliver online content (videos, webpages, worksheets) all in one place

3. Record the student's activity and progress.

4. Exposure to the system that most colleges use for their online content delivery.

What Moodle won't do:

1. Plan the classes for you. For most homeschoolers this amount of planning may feel labor-intensive unless you'll have more than one student in a class.

Step One will be to install Moodle on a computer connected to your home network. I installed on an older machine running WinXP Professional. I will likely migrate to a Ubuntu server later and I'll let you know how that goes when we get there.

1. Point your browser to http://moodle.org/.

2. Click the Downloads icon (lower right hand side).

3. Download the appropriate packages. In this case, Moodle for Windows.

4. Follow the standard download instructions.

5. Extract your packages someplace easy to remember (the Desktop or My Documents perhaps)

6. Within the extracted folder double-click the icon labeled "Start Moodle"

7. Follow the initial set-up instructions, usernames/password assignments etc.

8. Open your web browser and type http://localhost, again follow any set up instructions.

9. Now you have your Moodle Server. From the local machine you will be able to type "http://localhost", from remote computers it will be the IP address of that machine (in my case 10.181.46.102 - yours will be different).

10. Start customizing your experience. There are lots of links to the left - Appearance, Accounts, Courses - start experimenting and have fun.

I think that most of the controls are fairly easy to understand and inputting the course information is relatively simple; however, there is a lot of planning to be done. So, crack open your child's textbooks and think about how you want the school year to be divided. All of our courses have been assigned a weekly period so far, but I may change to "by lesson" for Math in particular.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 - The Student Experience.