When you are schooling-at-home or homeschooling, the tools that you use are so important. By selecting the right tools, you can help to engage your children and create more effective learning experiences for them. It is more important than ever to use technology as part of your homeschooling because it is such a huge part of our lives. There are so many great tech tools for homeschooling out there, but a lot of parents don’t know where to start when deciding which ones they should be using. This list will help you to make sense of some of the different schooling tech that is available and choose the right tools for your lessons.
E-Readers
Reading is a central part of learning any subject, but if you are not already using ebooks, you are missing a big opportunity. E-readers are not that expensive and you can usually buy ebooks for a lot less than you would buy physical copies. It also saves a lot of space because you can store thousands of books digitally. There are also some great learning benefits to using e-readers, like built-in dictionaries, for example. It’s easy for your child to click on a word that they don’t know and get a definition right away, so it helps to improve their vocabulary. A lot of e-readers also allow you to download audiobooks that highlight the text as they go, which is a very effective way for children to improve their reading skills and branch out into more difficult books.
LanSchool
One of the big issues that you have when giving your child access to technology is that there are a lot of distractions, like social media. If they are using laptops, it is important that they stay focused. The LanSchool classroom Chromebook management is a great tool that helps you manage technology during lessons. For example, you can bring up blank screens at the click of a button when you need your children to focus on you. It is also easy to monitor and restrict internet usage, so children are not distracted during lessons. This becomes more essential when you are schooling more children.
Youtube
Most people don’t think of Youtube as an educational tool, and it’s probably something that your kids use a lot when they are outside of lessons. But it is actually a great tool to use during lessons as well because there is a lot of great educational content on there. There are a lot of topics that can be difficult to explain, but a simple video with some diagrams and animations can help to make things a lot clearer. Your children will also find it a lot more fun and engaging than reading from a worksheet or a book.
Voice Assistants
Voice assistants are great pieces of tech that make life so much easier. You can set them up to work in conjunction with smart devices like light bulbs so you can control them with your voice, but did you also consider how useful they could be when teaching? It’s always difficult when one of your children asks a question that you don’t quite know the answer to. You don’t want to give them the wrong information so you can’t just make something up or guess. However, if you have a voice assistant in the room, it’s easy to quickly ask questions and get an answer. There are also some great games, like quizzes that you can play to give the kids a break, while still educating them in some way. You can also use it to play music related to composer studies or read your books in your Audible library for history or literature.
Google Suite
Google has so many great applications aside from their voice assistant, which can be a huge help when homeschooling. Their calendar app is great for organizing all of your lessons and keeping track of your schedule so you know what you should be doing each day. Google Docs is great for making worksheets and for keeping your children’s work organized. It is so easy to share and collaborate on documents as well, so you can save yourself a lot of time and money because you do not need to print things off. You can keep all of the documents that you used stored in Google Drive for free, so you can always use things again if you need to.
When you are homeschooling, it is important that you make use of the right tools. These are all very effective pieces of technology that will help you to stay organized and improve the quality of your lessons. When you are learning at home, you need all the tools you can get.