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Homeschool Minder Review


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I'm back with another review of an online homeschool planner to continue on the theme of the Online Homeschool Planners in 2020 thread. Over the last few weeks, I've been exploring Homeschool Minder, a homeschool planner that's been around since 2012. Homeschool Minder was mentioned in passing in a 2019 thread, but hasn't come up since 2013 prior to that, so I wanted to find out if it was still worth considering in 2021. Homeschool Minder pitches itself as a tool to "be a better teacher." Let's see how that claim holds up.

The service offers a 30 day free trial and is $4.99 per month or $39.99 for the year. My biggest takeaway about Homeschool Minder is that the service is aimed at the kind person that is extremely detail oriented. I discovered a huge set of features and things that you could track about your students. Frankly, I found it overwhelming. On the bright side, there was a lot of documentation to help explain all these features, even if it's a lot to fit in your head.

With Homeschool Minder, you get a calendar that can track activities down to the hourly level if you want. To run a school year, users:

  • Set a school year
  • Create school terms for the year
  • Add courses and set them to terms
  • Add lesson plans to courses
  • Within a lesson plan, create instructional plans and assignments to determine what students should do. These instructional plans can be set various timing schedules and recurrence intervals with the calendar's advanced tooling.
  • Register students with courses to fill the individual's calendar with activities

This was what I saw as the main flow. There are some side capabilities and alternative paths as well. Activities can be created to support "skills." A set of skills are part of a "standard" and can include some informal assessments. The service also includes the ability to create activities directly on the calendar without going through lesson plans. The direct calendar access seems to be the way to set appointments, chores, fields trips, and other types of events.

As you can see, there's a ton of data that you can add to Homeschool Minder. Because of all the data that the service is able to collect, there are a large number of reports that the service is able to produce.

When I chatted with my wife about all of this, she made some interesting observations that were fitting. She noted that a lot of the data that Homeschool Minder tracks seems like things that you might want in a more traditional classroom setting. The language around tracking "standards" definitely fit that mindset to me.

Anyway, if any of you have experience with Homeschool Minder, I'd love to hear about it. Did I represent the service fairly? I wrote a comparison to School Desk, the service that I built for my family if you'd like to check it out (spoiler: School Desk picks the tradeoff of simplicity and collects less data for an easier to understand model of homeschool planning).

I'll be taking a look at Homeschool Planet next to see what that service offers to homeschooling families.

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