Homeschool Computing: Things to do with a Computer in Homeschool

Why am I writing about homeschool instead of technology?: The purpose of this post is to provide a context for describing the computers and technology we use in operating our homeschool. We do not believe there is one best way to homeschool so this post is not an endorsement of a particular method. Rather, it is just a description of what works for us. Having spoken to lots of homeschoolers, we know there are as many different ways to homeschool as there are homeschoolers. There are also many commonalities. We believe that whether one uses a Classical Education approach, one of the large commercial curricula like Sonlight, Calvert, or Abeka, or even Unschooling, good use of technology can enhance the experience.

This post is divided into three main sections. The first section is a brief discussion of how our lifestyle choices have influenced how we use technology. The second is on our curricula. The third contains descriptions of things we like to do with technology.

Philosophy

The extent to which world views and lifestyle choices influence how we use technology amazes me. We have made decisions about how to live our lives and raise our children that have made some commonly used technologies very useful to us while others have become almost irrelevant. Of course one of the biggest choices was to take accept full responsibility for our children’s academic education. The following is an example of a choice we have made the influences our use of technology.

My wife and I both grew up in households without a televisions. We always wanted our children to have that same privilege. We are well aware that it can be a bad thing to so totally shelter children from popular culture that they cannot function in society. What does that have to do with the use of technology in a homeschool? We decided that we would introduce them to popular culture be carefully managing the media they have available to them. We do this by helping them select DVD videos and audio CD’s the whole family can enjoy together. Without a television we have to be able to watch the DVD’s on a computer. We have an audio CD player, but it is nice to be able to listen to them on the computer, too.

Curricula, Methods, and Materials

This section gives a brief description of the curricula and day-to-day operation of our homeschool. We include this information to show that we are fairly typical homeschoolers and to set up the following section that discusses our the things for which we use the computer and other technologies. At the writing of this post, we are within a week of finishing our second full year of homeschooling. We homeschooled our daughter in the first grade for one year, then put the kids into public school for three years. Next year our daughter will be in sixth grade and our son will be in fourth grade.

The Curricula – The following two lists will be quite most meaningful to folks who have either homeschooled or investigated homeschooling. The first is a list of the curricula we use. The second is a list of magazines to which we describe. All of these are integral to our homeschooling. Following the list is the description of a typical homeschool day in our household.

Math – Singapore Math

English Literature – Sonlight

History – Sonlight

Writing – Wordsmith and Igniting Your Writing

English Grammar – Easy Grammar

Spelling – Spelling Power

Science – Sonlight and RealScience-4-Kids

Handwriting – A Reason for Handwriting

Spanish – TBD

Physical Education – Swimming, tennis, alpine skiing lessons, and homeschool play group

Music – Piano lessons

Scripture memorization

So, then, what do we do with our computer?

Streaming audio and CD audio disks – One of our favorite things to do in the evenings is listen to a children’s radio theatre program called Adventures in Odyssey. The problem with the program is that only comes on at certain hours during the day, none of which seem to fall at a time that is not already occupied by our busy homeschool schedule. The kids like to listen to their program while I am correcting their daily homeschool work. Fortunately, the programs are available on the internet, so we can listen to them at our leisure if our computer supports audio streaming. As mentioned above, we often listen to CD’s on our computer, too.

Connecting to the Internet – The internet is another hard and on-going choice. On the one hand, we do not see much need for our children to spend any solo time on the internet. On the other hand, we use email a lot, regularly listen to the program described above, maintain a blog and image gallery, use instant messaging, and would like to use internet telephony as we have family in other countries. Currently, we only use a dial-up connection because the only broadband connections available to us are very expensive satellite and cable. The cable is expensive because we do not already have cable television so it would run us around $60 per month. As soon as DSL is available, we will probably get that.

Digital photography, image processing, and desktop publishing – One set of grandparents lives in Mexico, the other a little over an hour drive away. All the grandparents like to see pictures of their grandkids. We have a private photo gallery on the internet where we post several photos per week. We like to include photos in our blog, create greeting cards, invitations, flyers for neighborhood and community homeschool events, and prepare school papers complete with photographs. We even like to put some of that kind of thing on the refigeratior with a magnet. We need a way to get images from the camera into the computer, manipulate the images for size and content, and get them onto the internet or a CD, or print them on paper or t-shirts.

Digital video – We do the shoot a lot of the same kinds of digital video as many other families. We shoot video of our kids at piano recitals and sports events. We like to burn CD’s of our videos to send down to Mexico for our family down there. We like to add titles and soundtracks to the videos. One of my personal goals for this project is to upgrade our video recording media from CD’s to DVD’s. As mentioned above, we use our computer as a DVD player.

Claymation – At the beginning of the school your, my wife took our daughter to some event that was just for women, so my son and I had the evening alone together. We came up with the great idea of using the web camera to do a claymation style video. We took a serious of individual snapshots of him with a little black dot of paper drawn to look like a fly moving over all over his face, in his nose, out his mouth. We accumulated the images into a video using software available on our Windows PC. It was just the kind of humor that only a third grade boy would find hilariously appealing. He has been an avid claymation fan ever since. We really need our system to be capable of producing claymations.

Office applications – Of course, the kids use a word processor for outlines, reports and other writing assignments. This year, I have used a spreadsheet for producing the daily schedules and tracking progress for performance on multiplication flash cards. Our first language at home is Spanish, so we need to be able to change the keyboard back and forth between American English and Mexican Spanish key settings. We used to do flyers and that sort of thing with the word processor, but now we have moved over to a desktop publishing program.

PDA Synchronization – We do not have Gameboys, XBoxes, or anything of that nature. The reason is that there are so many other things we need to accomplish we do not want the kids wasting their time on the arcade and first person shooter style games. Still, it is nice to have a handheld game machine for long trips to Mexico or to the mountain for skiing. We bought a very inexpensive Zire Palm Pilot a couple of years back. We found there were a good number of games available for it to keep the kids entertained on long trips. Games like the old Colossal Cave, Pong, Solitaire, and many other free games. One thing led to another. One thing led to another. There is software available to synchronize a Palm Pilot with the Evolution calendar, groupware suite. The plan for next year will be to give a little additional responsibility to the kids for their own study schedules buy managing the schedules through Evolution and an inexpensive new Palm Pilot.

Website management, photo galleries, and blogs – We have had a personal family web site for seven or eight years now. It was always somewhat of a hassle to manage until about six months ago. We found an inexpensive (very), easy to manage web hosting service. It is just awsome that they provide such a great product and super service for such a low price. I have no affiliation with these guys at all, but I have used a number of these services and nothing else has come close. We have a home page, a blog, and a photo gallery that we actively use. We use NVU to write and post our web pages, WordPress for blogging, and Gallery for our gallery. We are thinking of eventually starting an online business as a teaching tool. This same web hosting supports the shopping cart programs required to do that, too.

CAD/CAM – We have plans to remodel our house. Our desire is to use the remodel as a teaching opportunity. We will teach the kids how to use a two dimensional drafting program to make the drawings for our remodel. Currently, we use this same program to draw shapes we carve on a small computer controlled (CNC) router. We save the drawings as DXF files that can be converted to G-Code programs using another program. G-Code programs are run on the CNC router to make the movements needed to cut the shapes we want.

Personal Finance – We try to teach economics and personal financial responsibility as part of our homeschool program. In the coming year, the kids will use a program to communicate with the bank, track their investments and account activities, perform budgeting tasks.

Local area networks, printing, and Windows programs – We have a Windows computer at our house. We are using it less and less all the time, but there are several programs we still use. Currently we have the system networked to our Linux computer via a crossover network cable. We will discuss how we did that, but we are planning to switch over to a wireless network, so we will discuss that, too. The main programs we use on the Windows computer are the few games we let the kids play such as Sim Tower, Rise of Nations, Civilization, several Nancy Drew mysteries, and Zoo, Lemondade, and Roller Coaster Tycoon. In addition, the only school work we have the kids do during the summer is to spend fifteen minutes per day on Mavis Beacon Typing. The only other thing we do with that computer is use it as a host for our printer. After most of the other stuff is up and running, our plan is to move the printer to a Linux computer and attempt to make all the Windows programs run on the Linux computer using a program called Wine.

Programming – I program in C and C++ for a living. I want to teach my kids at least a little bit about programming. I am not sure exactly which way I will go with that instruction, but I am sure we will not start with C or C++. Ubuntu uses Python, it is an object oriented, interpreted language with lots of available libraries and development tools. If this paragraph has not made to much sense yet, that is OK. The bigger point is that I am planning to write my own homeschool friendly tutorial on how to program. Python or Ruby are the latest languages that provide the best combination of power and ease of use that make them candidates for this project. It will probably have something to do with robotics and machine vision or at least some way to control physical devices connected to a computer and the internet as that is what I do for a living. Some ideas might include weather stations, green houses, smart cameras, or some other such things.

Music Composition

I am hopelessly deficient when it comes to music. Both of our children have been taking piano lessons since they were six. Their teacher has an MFA from a fine univerisity and likes her students to compose if they have that bent. I would like to add a music composition that supports a connection to midi devices to our package.

What is next?