Thanks for your suggestions. Alright I’ll try reaching out elsewhere and if it turns out that crisis schoolers are looking for some assistance I’ll return here to learn about how homeschooling works and best practices. I don’t have a lot of time to monitor this but if anyone has any remaining questions, comments or suggestions I’ll try to get back to you.

Thanks for your suggestions. Thank you for asking questions instead of making assumptions about me, here are my answers: I thought homeschoolers would be a good group to reach out to because I know a big wave of them just began homeschooling recently because of the pandemic and I thought the inexperienced teachers could potentially use some assistance. I don’t have any experience with homeschool education but I can draw/write some code/run some statistical tests/just do time-consuming tasks that require few skills. I also reached out to public school teachers. My idea was to reach out to both groups and compile feedback to see if anyone was receptive to receiving additional help from undergrads; if so, I would focus my efforts on the group who seemed most open to my idea. I want to pursue a project like this because I have a side passion for education. I’m a certified tutor and want to eventually educate adults as part of my job. If I can lend the professional skills I’ve developed so far in some way to help with additional educational challenges introduced by the pandemic I think that is a good use of the time I would spend working in a part-time job under normal circumstances. I would get to contribute to a cause I care about and develop my professional skills in my spare time as a building block on my resume. Some of the problems I’ve personally experienced and seen as a tutor include: students’ difficulties with time management and organizational skills; dyscalculia; mature students not having attended school for decades and having knowledge gaps; low self-esteem; low motivation to learn; and depression and anxiety provoked by concern about marks, social difficulties, the transition to first-year university, etc.

Thank you for your comments. Certainly reading up on homeschooling methods and trying to understand the differences with a classroom environment will be important, I think I’ll start with the book The Well-Trained Mind and the Cathy Duffy website mentioned previously. I definitely couldn’t run PE programs but I could do some of the behind-the-scenes work to help reach out to private schools/little leagues to advocate for these programs to be set up/collect information for parents. I guess educational apps/games could be a possibility if there is enough need for them, if we emphasize they are just a supplement to other in-depth activities and we have homeschool educators review them for educational value. I’m not really sure what we could do about parents having trouble connecting with teens and ensuring there is “great conversation” in their learning, and don’t have any experience with unschooling but I will do some research to try to understand the problems. To answer your question @2_girls_mommy (thank you for not jumping to conclusions haha), I am trying to start a project where we would acquire some initial funding and we would provide some kind of assistance to educators in our free time for a reasonable number of hours each week outside of full-time school. It could be a volunteer commitment but it should involve some kind of significant skill development. I’m a math and statistics student/amateur digital artist working with a graphic design student and a CS student/amateur digital artist. It would be great if we could do something artistic or where we apply skills from our majors in some way but my priority would be trying to help address a relevant problem.

Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it. I promise I’m not trying to “ruin children’s lives.” So it looks like additional resources designed to teach content are not needed, and it would be better for trained educators to work on them anyway instead of inexperienced undergrad students. For new homeschoolers who need assistance with networking I can imagine we could volunteer our time compiling lists of locations and resources but that would probably be better done by experienced homeschoolers who are familiar with the available resources already. @City Mouse, I imagine one thing we could do would be to advocate for changes on educational websites to be more accessible, e.g. point out where a video or an image should have supplementary text to help describe what is going on for the screen reader to process. It probably wouldn’t be that difficult to research this and just reach out to the webmasters to voice concerns if other people are too busy to contact them. We could possibly even volunteer to write transcripts/descriptions, I think that could be time-consuming for the website managers to create but something we would be capable of doing even though we're just students.

I'm asking because I want to start a project with other undergrad students to create edtech/additional resources to help support teachers, and I want to see what pain points we should focus on developing resources to help address.

Hello educators, I am a tutor and an undergrad student who is interested in learning more about the concerns and pain points of homeschooling parents, both before and during the pandemic. I am interested in knowing: -What your teaching situation looks like: your geographic location, grade level, day-to-day activities, homeschooling program, etc. -What significant issues have you experienced/are you experiencing with homeschooling right now? Thanks!