On-line Planners

[Tarheel Heather]

Has anyone used this?

 

Home School, Inc http://www.home-school-inc.com/

 

Just curious as to what your thoughts were!

[Aunty Social]

I used it for the first time this year. Overall a good program, easy to use and has most of the things I look for. Most important was that I could use it with my Mac - when is someone finally going to make one for us?! I was very worried about using an online program, much prefer to have it nice and safe on my hard drive, but found that it worked well. It has a lot of nice features, like auto calculating and entering lesson plans (you make a template and tell it what lesson or page numbers to start with, how many at a time, and when to end), the move day and skip day features, and many more. It's very versatile, and you can edit and tweek almost everything that you enter. Good for me, because I end up changing things around as we get going and realize that some things don't work quite like I'd like them to. I did take the extra step this year of printing out all the reports (coursework, report cards, etc) and filing them. I am in the process now of deleting last years plans so that this years won't take forever and a day to load up.

 

A couple of minor issues:

Once in a while the site will glitch and give you an error message or freeze up, doesn't happen as much now that I've switched browsers from Safari to Firefox.

Also, the program doesn't automatically calculate the report card grades. Good in some ways, but I'm lazy:tongue_smilie: and didn't like the extra step of calculating and entering them myself.

On a different note, since it's an online program you need to be somewhere with internet access to use it. Normally not an issue, but I like to do a lot of my planning while the kids are outside or at the pool, so that means I end up using paper and pencil to jot down my notes and then transfer them over to the computer later.

 

Sorry for the long post. HTH

[WyoSylvia]

I tried it for a little while but it didn't work for me. I have a very sequential/orderly mind and it was not a good fit. I appreciated that it was free and had a few nice features but I didn't feel the design was very intuitive, many screens looked alike and often I couldn't enter things where I wanted to, I would have to search for where they wished me to enter information. I chose to go with Homeschool Tracker Plus which I am quite happy with. It is not free :D (about $50) but their updates are, they have great support and I really think it will last me all through our school years.

 

Good luck in your search. Hope this helps a bit.