Spend time with your kids, not your computer
That’s what we set out to do for ourselves in launching myhomeschoolplan.com, spend more time with our kids, less time on the computer staying organized.
My wife and I started homeschooling last summer. Well really, my wife does 99% of the work, I happen to work out of my home office, so I’m around. But I digress. Last summer, Jenn and I were scrambling all over the Internet and we were amazed at all the help that there was available in getting started with homeschooling. Lots of forums. Tons of blogs. Loads of website recommendations. And curriculum planning galore. We literally were overwhelmed with options. Nevertheless, we waded through the options for our three kids (Saxon Math or Singapore, Classical Schooling or Unschooling, online or books, etc.).
But one area of the homeschool journey didn’t offer as many choices as we liked. The day to day managing of our school. The setting up of our day or week (depending on the child, two liked planning by week, our youngest liked planning day by day). And then recording the activities when they were done.
There were a small handful of options, a couple that were CD downloads, and a couple that were online; but none really were what we were looking for. We wanted easy and intuitive, we didn’t want to have to fight the software to get what we wanted.
Eureka! We decided that we were going to build a web-based, easy to use application to create our homeschool schedule and record our activities. And we were on our way. We think there’s plenty of room in this sandbox and will never bash the other sites, and hope that a rising tide raises all ships as it were.
So the company I co-founded with Dave Reid, TexoDev, began work on the product, and we are going to launch this August. This blog will hopefully get the word out for anyone who is interested in using our application, for free! We are going to offer this first semester for free to entice as many of you as possible to use our humble little application and tell us what you think, and help us make it better for you.
We have big plans but always want to focus first on the user experience, making it as pleasing and elegant as possible. So subscribe to the blog via RSS or email (see the icons at the upper right of this page and click on whichever you like). Follow us on Twitter (at the right). And comment at Twitter or in the blog to let us know what you think.
Future blog posts will delve into feature/functions of this first release, and future releases, as well as other homeschooling topics of interest. You can hop over to our development blog at TexoDev to follow our blogging about the technical side (we’re using Ruby to write the application if you’re interested.) We will be starting those topics next week.
So thanks for following and please let us know what you’d like to see in Your Homeschool Plan.
myhomeschoolplan.com “spend time with your kids, not your computer”