Greetings, Are you ready to enable your child to connect with other kids around the world? Student exchange is no longer limited to physical travel. Using Skype and a strategic approach, just about any parent can find the suitable and approved connection with other families around the world. It is not that easy just yet, but many of us are doing it already. Let me know if I can help you get started. If your child is already Skype bound, let me know how do you connect with others whom you never met before in person? What policies do you have in place to approve / disapprove Skype connections? Do you know of a service or portal where parents can get introduced and then let their children connect from there on? Z

Hello from Derry NH. Now that we have so many of us from New England, shall we start thinking to organize a meetup in support of this forum? Probably not, or yes? People come and go, I wonder how many of us keep an eye on these posts? My guess is about 1-3 % but that is a generalized guess. I am new here so I do not know yet the dynamics of this portal. What do you think? Z PS: Maybe such Meetup is already in place? If so, do you know about it and care to share the URL?

You have started a very good topic here and it has grown to a sizable post now with all the replies. May I suggest to turn this into a podcast? Let me explain it: The time needed to read is limited for everybody. Even a great post like this and all the awesome replies that I presume to be present here, people like me lose out on due to lack of time to read. Of course we could approach this with a speed read and skimming the surface type of approach, but that would not serve this topic well. Have this conversation brought to the audio and distributed via podcast, enables rest of the world to find this topic and hear it out at times of what I call "in-between tasking". (Welcome to the mobile revolution). This leave us with the question: how to do it and who will do it? The how is fairy easy for people like me or anyone who is willing to invest the time to learn it, but the question of who will do it, is rather larger. If you would willing to invest your time to read the articles and the posts replies, then I am willing to help punting them up at least on YT, but Podcast as well if it comes out in good enough quality. Then we can open up the invitation to contributors to this thread to voice their own comments personally and before we know, now we have a conversation going on and this tread won't implode. Hopefully the admin of this site will look upon this idea positively and constructively but their is a chance that he/she / they wont and the idea is dead before it can even get started. That is politics and I do not which way such wind is blowing here, since I am a new member. For now I close this comment here with my pledge to support and help to bring this conversation out in a multimedia format so more of us can benefit from all the content published and the future post that are bound to come. :grouphug: Z

Your question can be viewed from many different perspective. The one I share here is my current reality. I let my girls to direct their attention to whatever constructive subject that is in their mind. The past several weeks since they discovered Minecraft and the associated opportunities to connect with other kids around the world.. well our home is very much like that they are on the computer every waken minute of the day. This is a temporary situation while we are locked down at home while the frozen ground and snow covered areas that we often visit during the day are closed. The screen time is a concern but we are equally motivated parents about giving my girls the opportunity to follow their bliss. With creative parental input, this motivation to play Minecraft now has been upgraded to do programming. At age 7 & 8 it is a huge step but they get it! So the question back to you is this: how creative are you to aid and direct the time spent front of the screen so it maximizes the child’s development? Of course my question to you is all in the spirit of cooperation and not to challenge you. I’d hope that you challenge yourself, because with a negative attitude towards technology, it will have a delaying effect on your children to learn or all together to stop them exploring one o the most important field that will affect their future. (We like it or not IT effect every part of our lives.) If you need help sorting things out about IT, feel free to ask people. The more specific questions you have, the better answers you’ll get. If you like to see a recent example what kids do when parents supporting them to learn about computers, check this out: Was this of any help to you?

Hello WTM Community, I venture to introduce ourselves through our unorganized YT channel where most of our video are set private or shared unlisted but there are still a dozen or so that remained public after a cleanup attempt I made a few weeks ago. My current focus point in our home based education with my girls Sari (7) and Zsuzsi (8) is to find other K12 kids who are using Skype and ready to connect with other like-minded kids. My plan is working and my girls are super interested connecting with other kids who play Minecraft but also started to explore the creative expression through programing using the tool called Scratch from MIT. My preference is to initiate a connection with parent who actively helping their children to learn by connecting with other kids around the world. Yesterday for instance I met a father in Norway and that helped me better understand why my girls are so eager to get on line at various times (sometime late, sometimes very early) so they can accommodate the time zone differences. By connecting with the parents, strategic suggestions can be made to help the individual education goals so our children can benefit from both the structured and the unstructured time spent on line. Before I go much further here, let this be our introduction and hoping to connect with those of you who thinks along similar lines as we do and ready to make full use of the technology we have available to us and build our virtual “classrooms†at home. Best regards to you all, Z

Hello Camielle What state you are in? (Here I go assuming that you are in the US.) Apparently your story is similar to mine since your children are school age and if you just starting out, that means your Sun and Moon went to school before. It is not an uncommon situation when parents receive a wakeup call, as it was in my situation. What is your motivation to home educate? It is a story often worth sharing so I encourage you to do so, perhaps writing blog articles, empowered by vlogs. (I am happy to help if you need it.) In my case I wish that I’d started to write my experience earlier. Now I am starting all over with my second family, so after raising my Sun and moon, now I have two new stars to let them shine. Yesterday I stumbled upon this community, so I have no idea about the people here but it seems to me a large community. My mission is to help build a virtual classroom for my girls (7 & 8), thus we are seeking other K12 age children who are on Skype and interested connecting with other K12 age kids. We live in New Hampshire, the private hence isolated suburbia where the air is clean, the water we drink straight out of the ground without chemicals. Wild life is plenty but meeting with other likeminded kids and parents does not come easy. This is it for now. If you wish, I can share from plenty of resources I have been accumulating. To get a feel for us, perhaps our YT channel is the fastest way to do so. http://www.youtube.com/user/HomeEducatingFathers Oh, my 7 year old just came to me asking for help. She wants to write a letter to grandma so it is time fo rme to go. Welcome again and let's see if we can connect. Till next time. Z