Spotty Banana Homeschool

Homeschool instruction varies from structured, ‘public school at home’ style to complete unschooling, so keeping track of student achievement can be difficult and confusing. However, free online tools can help homeschoolers document their work in a searchable, organized manner.

The most useful tools are blogs, video sharing sites, bookmark managers, book list managers and photo-sharing sites.

The easiest way to start is to create a free blog on either WordPress.com or Blogger.com. With both, you have the option of making the blog private and also password-protecting it so that only you can view it. After all, the primary purpose is to document personal progress, not to become ‘popular’ on search engines. Other free online tools can be integrated into your blog once you have created user accounts on the sites.

Ideas

• Use the free bookmarking tool, Del.icio.us, to organize all of the useful websites you use for online learning.
• Use Flickr or Picasa to document field trips or science projects
• Use LibraryThing to document books on your summer reading list

• If you have access to a video camera (even a digital camera that captures video) and basic video editing tools, why not document a science experiment or art project and post to YouTube or TeacherTube (You can also make YouTube videos private via password-protection).

Tips for organizing content

• Tag all entries with meaningful keywords
• Use descriptive titles
• Don’t create more than 15 blog categories
• Embed videos into blog, where appropriate
• Link to your De.licio.us links, photo site and LibraryThing pages from your blog

Benefits

Building an online archive of homeschooler’s achievements not only preserves content in a private, organized, categorized and searchable format, it empowers the homeschooler to actively participate in the process. Also, maintaining an online ‘journal’ provides plenty of typing practice and offers a perfect opportunity to teach about copyright laws!

Read more about Documenting Student Achievement in our past posts

• Three Online Tools
• Homeschoolers can publish their own book
• Enter Contests