The Educating Parent (merging Beverley Paine's Homeschool Australia and Unschool Australia)

Collaborating With Your Kids

In the digital age there's countless opportunities for technology to help enhance your home learning. Pair this with the fact that the performance of homeschooling is better than ever and you can bring a refreshingly up-to-date and valuable learning experience to your beloved kids. What might surprise you, too, is that you don't even need to pay top dollar to get your hands on some of the best and most intuitive technology.

The Benefits

Using digital technology will, of course, have all of the classic benefits; reducing the amount of money you spend on physical materials, lessening your environmental impact, and often providing a more attractive proposition to kids than 'boring' pencil and paper. Studies have shown that on a deeper level there's a huge range of educational benefits . In terms of actual software you can use today, however, home educators should look at the benefits of Google Drive.

Google Drive

On the face of it, Google Drive is what it says on the tin - a digital version of your hard drive, or favourite cloud software, that can store and share files as you require. In reality, there are hundreds of features hiding under that basic surface that can enhance your homeschooling experience. The software is entirely hosted via your browser, though you can get an app on smart devices to access it easily, and features the full range of office-style applications - a document writer, spreadsheet creator, and far, far more.

Probably first and foremost among the benefits of is the ability for anyone to work collaboratively on individual files . You could use this in a number of creative ways - from simple preventing squabbles over bits of paper, to creating your own creative and multi-sensory learning experiences that the whole family can access and interact with on personal devices.

Saving tears

The ability to easily rollback your documents can save meltdowns, especially with younger children, if mistakes have been made. You need not worry about losing your data, or a computer crash erasing valuable work.

Empowerment

Homeschooling heavily emphasises the empowering of your kids . The manner in which learning can be delivered using Google Drive, seamlessly and with the power in their hands to chop, change and learn in real-time, can be a real boon to building a sense of individualism in your kids and the feelings of responsibility and agency that are so effectively built by intimate homeschooling.

Google Drive is an extremely useful tool for the home without even considering what the application will be for homeschooling. As outlined, there are a range of great applications for the software out there and benefits you can gain from it.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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Beverley Paine with her children, and their home educated children, relaxing at home.

Together with the support of my family, my aim is to help parents educate their children in stress-free, nurturing environments. In addition to building and maintaing this website, I continue to create and manage local and national home educating networks, help to organise conferences and camps, as well as write for, edit and produce newsletters, resource directories and magazines. I am an active supporter of national, state, regional and local home education groups.

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Collaborating With Your Kids