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We're in our final week of summer homeschooling (although I am not completely confident that we'll get everything finished this week), so I will be trying to get the finishing touches done on our lesson plans for the new school year. The curriculum has been chosen, and we should be ready to go, but as I was thinking about what remains on my to-do list for school, I noticed that the topic for the upcoming Schoolhouse Review Crew round-up is our favorite homeschool product - the one thing we could not homeschool without.
Generally speaking, that would have to be the internet/computer, right?! If I didn't have any of the books on hand, but I did have access to the internet, I would be able to find resources and curriculum for every subject we need to cover, and I'd be able to connect to others who could help. And they are not things, but how about other homeschoolers? I know I wouldn't have made it nearly this far as a homeschooler without the help and encouragement of supportive homeschool friends.
But if I was going to get a little more specific, and name tools I consider invaluable, I know I'd include Homeschool Tracker Online. I mention this planning and record-keeping program a lot because I depend on it so much. I started using Homeschool Tracker more than 10 years ago, when it was a software program that I had installed on my computer. Eventually it became Homeschool Tracker Online with planning tools and features using cloud access. Now I can view or update our schedules, records, lesson plans, grades, and reporting from my desktop or my laptop, and from anywhere I have internet access.
I love this program for keeping track of lesson plans, assignments, due dates, time spent, resource lists, and more. It's also my record of grades and credits, which makes it pretty easy for me to calculate quarterly or semester grades when I need to submit those to my oversight group. In fact, I could make my own transcript if I needed to! When I make a lesson plan in the Tracker, I can save it to use again with another student, so many of the lesson plans I'll be using for Kennady were created for my older kids, saving me time now. All I have to do is tell the Tracker when to schedule the assignments! (There are shared lesson plans available in the program as well, meaning that if someone else has already created a lesson plan for a particular curriculum and submitted it to the HST community, you can use it!) Once I've got lesson plans entered, I can assign to my student as needed. For us, that's usually about a month's worth of lessons at a time. I print the assignment lists for Kennady to check off as she completes them so it's easy for both of us to keep track of where we are. Then, when we inevitably move faster or slower than we'd planned, or decide to leave something out or change an assignment, it's easy to reschedule and print a new assignment list for the next month or so.
With the Tracker, I can produce a list of resources used, or a record of time spent. I can choose whether the grades are weighted or not. There are a lot of cool options too, like color-coding students, which I did last year when I still had two of them.
There's an ISBN look-up feature, which saves a lot of guesswork and time updating our homeschool resource list. I love the drag-and-drop sort feature in the Lesson Plans. I just noticed some newer updates have been rolled out recently, so I'm going to be checking those out this week to see exactly what's new.
After sticking with my older Homeschool Tracker program for many years, I finally made the switch to the online version last year when I was able to do a review of the program, and not that long ago, I renewed my subscription because I knew for sure that I did not want to be without this homeschool product! (Read my full review of Homeschool Tracker Online here: Homeschool Tracker Online: A Homeschool Coffee Break Review.)
Generally speaking, that would have to be the internet/computer, right?! If I didn't have any of the books on hand, but I did have access to the internet, I would be able to find resources and curriculum for every subject we need to cover, and I'd be able to connect to others who could help. And they are not things, but how about other homeschoolers? I know I wouldn't have made it nearly this far as a homeschooler without the help and encouragement of supportive homeschool friends.
But if I was going to get a little more specific, and name tools I consider invaluable, I know I'd include Homeschool Tracker Online. I mention this planning and record-keeping program a lot because I depend on it so much. I started using Homeschool Tracker more than 10 years ago, when it was a software program that I had installed on my computer. Eventually it became Homeschool Tracker Online with planning tools and features using cloud access. Now I can view or update our schedules, records, lesson plans, grades, and reporting from my desktop or my laptop, and from anywhere I have internet access.
I love this program for keeping track of lesson plans, assignments, due dates, time spent, resource lists, and more. It's also my record of grades and credits, which makes it pretty easy for me to calculate quarterly or semester grades when I need to submit those to my oversight group. In fact, I could make my own transcript if I needed to! When I make a lesson plan in the Tracker, I can save it to use again with another student, so many of the lesson plans I'll be using for Kennady were created for my older kids, saving me time now. All I have to do is tell the Tracker when to schedule the assignments! (There are shared lesson plans available in the program as well, meaning that if someone else has already created a lesson plan for a particular curriculum and submitted it to the HST community, you can use it!) Once I've got lesson plans entered, I can assign to my student as needed. For us, that's usually about a month's worth of lessons at a time. I print the assignment lists for Kennady to check off as she completes them so it's easy for both of us to keep track of where we are. Then, when we inevitably move faster or slower than we'd planned, or decide to leave something out or change an assignment, it's easy to reschedule and print a new assignment list for the next month or so.
With the Tracker, I can produce a list of resources used, or a record of time spent. I can choose whether the grades are weighted or not. There are a lot of cool options too, like color-coding students, which I did last year when I still had two of them.
There's an ISBN look-up feature, which saves a lot of guesswork and time updating our homeschool resource list. I love the drag-and-drop sort feature in the Lesson Plans. I just noticed some newer updates have been rolled out recently, so I'm going to be checking those out this week to see exactly what's new.
After sticking with my older Homeschool Tracker program for many years, I finally made the switch to the online version last year when I was able to do a review of the program, and not that long ago, I renewed my subscription because I knew for sure that I did not want to be without this homeschool product! (Read my full review of Homeschool Tracker Online here: Homeschool Tracker Online: A Homeschool Coffee Break Review.)
For that review, I received a one year membership for the purpose of the review. I use affiliate links for this product on my blog and in this post, but receive no other compensation for writing about or mentioning the product, nor was I required to write about or mention the product in this post.
What is a favorite homeschool product of yours - one you don't think you could manage without? Leave a comment and let me know, and link your posts about homeschooling high school here as well - I'd love to see what you are working on! Also, please visit your neighbors and leave some encouraging comments!
If you're homeschooling through high school and have not yet joined the Blog Roll, please take a moment to do that as well.
From the High School Lesson Book will be here on Mondays from now on. During the summer I will keep it short depending on what else we're doing, but I'd like to continue to connect with other homeschool bloggers with high school students through this link-up and the blog roll.
This post will be linked to the Favorite Homeschool Product Round-up on the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog, which will be live on Friday, August 26th.
This post will be linked to the Favorite Homeschool Product Round-up on the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog, which will be live on Friday, August 26th.
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1 comments:
looks like an interesting program, drag and drop eh? that sounds like my style...
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