Homeschool Manager Review

[Matt Layman]

I'm continuing on my goal to review online homeschool planners and report back to the forum on the experience, as I mentioned I would in the Online Homeschool Planners in 2020 thread. I've spent the last few weeks digging into Homeschool Manager. This one surprised me because I found zero mentions of the service on this forum, but I discovered that the site is very well done and useful.

As the name implies, Homeschool Manager definitely targets homeschool families (compared to my last review of the more generic Google Classroom). Homeschool Manager is a subscription service that dates back to at least 2015 from what I can find. After a 30 day free trial, the service is $49 per year or $5.99 per month. For that subscription, users get:

• Unlimited students
• Unlimited school years
• A scheduling tool
• A book tracking tool
• Volunteer hour tracking
• A variety of reports that homeschoolers probably need like report cards, transcripts, and attendance tracking

Overall, I liked the experience of using the application. I found help documentation and videos that covered the main features and thought the user interface to be pretty intuitive.

The service works like this:

1. You add your students.
2. You build your school year and declare the subjects you want in your homeschool.
3. Homeschool Manager provides a weekly scheduling view where you set your tasks for each of the subjects.

Once you're running your school year, you can see the course that are running for the day or check out the weekly view if you want more detail of what's happening in your school week. From the user interface, you can drag and drop tasks around on the weekly view and mark work as complete from that page as well.

For the extra features, I felt that the volunteer hour tracking was a neat feature. My kids are currently elementary aged, but I can see how that kind of volunteer tracking might be useful for high-schoolers seeking scholarships and needing to show proof of effort.

I think Homeschool Manager is very interesting, but differs from the service I'm building, School Desk, in a pretty substantial way. With Homeschool Manager, you set tasks on a specific date. If that date passes and your student didn't complete the work, the tasks become "overdue," and you have a pressure to deal with them on a dashboard page. With School Desk, my wife wanted to set a list of tasks and have the service build the entire week schedule automatically from that list. If you miss a day in School Desk, the unfinished tasks are automatically rolled forward to the next day. It's a different strategy, but I'm guessing it depends on your personality for what you'd like to do in that scenario.

I wrote up more details about Homeschool Manager with a comparison to School Desk, if you're interested in learning more.

I'm curious... if your students get behind in their tasks, how do you manage that? What techniques do you use? I'd imagine that it could be a source of guilt or stress when falling behind so I'm wondering how folks cope with that.

What else would you like to know about Homeschool Manager? I took pretty detailed notes about the experience and would be happy to share what I can.

[HomeAgain]

13 hours ago, Matt Layman said:

I'm curious... if your students get behind in their tasks, how do you manage that? What techniques do you use? I'd imagine that it could be a source of guilt or stress when falling behind so I'm wondering how folks cope with that.

It depends on the age.
There is no behind in elementary.  Elementary years are flexible, fluid, and geared toward specific academic skill mastery goals.  It changes a little in middle school, where learning how to meet deadlines becomes a part of the skill set.  My kids get a planner and a meeting at the beginning of each week.  The schedule has all the tasks, along with which are independent and which are teacher-led.  I give flexibility in the schedule for both, but teacher-led tasks need to be done during my available time so we decide on that together.  If a kid hasn't finished independent tasks by the end of the work week, the work week isn't over until they are done: no video games, no outside commitments, nothing.  It helps keep a kid from falling too far behind if the most they can put it off is 4 days.

[My4arrows]

15 hours ago, Matt Layman said:

I'm curious... if your students get behind in their tasks, how do you manage that? What techniques do you use? I'd imagine that it could be a source of guilt or stress when falling behind so I'm wondering how folks cope with that.

Similar to the PP. for elementary we work off of a task list and go at our pace and often add in interests along the way. Plans for these years are more of a record keeping than anything else. 
 

in middle school I have more defined due dates even when the younger ones and I go off track. I expect my middles schooler to work independently on specific subjects with those due dates.