With the new Apple iPod and all of the tablet computers coming out there are more and more e-books available. In the very near future all of the textbooks and educational material will be available for homeschooling parents to help in their curriculum teaching their kids. Indeed it’s already happening at a very rapid pace, and I’ve noted in the last three months the tremendous number of new educational e-books that are available to homeschooling parents.
In fact, if you go online and look at some of these homeschooling groups, it is amazing the amount of information they’ve accumulated to help teach their kids. If that’s the level they are teaching their kids, it far surpasses the public school, and yet I’ve also noted that there are some homeschooling parents that don’t want to move forward into the future using the high-tech devices. Now then, I realize that looking at a computer screen is probably not a smart thing to do for very young children, as their brains and minds are still forming, and you don’t wish to cause a discontinuity between the eyes and the brain.
But if someone is teaching a junior high or high school level and engaged in homeschooling, it would seem to me that these tablet computers are just the ticket. And they sure beat the textbooks because they come with interactive videos and can be linked to the Internet so each individual child can have a multimedia presentation of anything they are learning, on any subject known to mankind. Plus they can go online when their curiosity is piqued, and enjoy learning and discovery that way along with their homeschooling assignments.
Therefore, one could ask what is the problem with tablet computers and some homeschooling parents who are unsure of this new technology. My thinking is that not everyone is a first adopter, and it’s going to take some time especially for homeschooling parents who are perhaps working on their third child now and they have a certain way of doing things which has worked previously. However, these new tools can help accelerate learning, and increase the advantage of homeschooling, which quite frankly already has the advantage over public schools, and take learning to a whole new level.
If you are a homeschooling parent, perhaps you might kick around some of the ideas that I’ve presented here on a philosophical level and consider the migration to tablet computing for your home school curriculum. Indeed I will leave you with that, and I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow