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Online School

Dealing with home schooling can lead to a lot of online school. Is that a bad thing? I think it really depends on the quality of the online school and the amount of interaction that kids have online as well as in the real world. Online learning is something that many adults have yet to master but it is fast becoming the preferred method for many schools, job trainers, and other training organizations. However there are a few things that online schools must do to be effective:

Online schools must offer more than just a read and recite type environment. They need to be interactive and they need to go above and beyond what should be expected. Taking away the human touch that is important for learning is a gamble and to make up for it there must be other aspects to the curriculum.

There must be some form of interaction. Whether this simple question and answer type of material or something more complex like email correspondence with a teacher. There needs be some give and take.

The online school must employ a couple different types of learning. Some students are great at reading material and internalizing it, others hate this avenue and would be much happier watching some type of video presentation. Others may want to listen to the subject in an audio format. The great thing about online school is that it is possible to utilize many different learning styles in the same lesson. If you are at all familiar with different types of learning styles then this approach will be familiar.

Some type of bench mark must be visible and some type of progress tracker is important. I am not necessarily talking about grades here, but it is important for kids to see how they are stacking up against the whole. This can be motivational or it can let a kid know that they are not working hard enough. This can be painful, but taking away the competitive aspect of schooling has dangerous consequences. Progress tracking is also important. It lets the student know how much they have done and how much they have to do, it could be depicted with a graph, or a time line of some sort. This is an important aspect of turning a kid loose and giving them independent work. Having them chart their own progress takes a load off of the parents shoulders and teaches your child responsibility.

There are certainly other aspects to online school and there are many options to choose from. It may be just for a class or it could be for the entire year but online schooling is becoming a very important component of many homeschool classrooms. It will however never take the place of real human interaction. So, even if you decide to use online school extensively with your homeschooler make sure that they are still getting that valuable human interaction.

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