Golly that title sounds like something a robot wrote. Anyways. Like most folks, Bek and I have been homeschooling our kids for the first time, but as of a week ago we have been needing to integrate our personal homeschool approach with some curriculum elements from the school our kids used to attend. It was pretty stressful initially, because there’s a lot of moving parts:
- Two kids in two different classes with two different teachers
- Two old laptops that they use to do their online school work + videos
- Multiple websites, facebook groups, and email threads for sharing zoom links, assignments, and work sheets
- Our own homeschool curriculum (which is mostly dinosaurs but)
- And so on
Now, maybe your school has a super organized, secure, online hub that can walk kids through each activity they’re doing during the day, but since e-learning is super new to most schools in the US, there’s a good chance that that is not something most folks have access to at the moment. Also there’s a very good chance that whatever that is isn’t going to help integrate whatever material you’re doing outside of the small amount of material your school is required to organize and share.
So yeah, kind of stressful, since this is in addition to our other work-from-home responsibilities and our run-a-home-during-a-quarantine responsibilities.
A small thing we just instituted earlier today that seems to help is to set up view-only Google docs - a separate one for each kid. Bek and I both have edit access to these documents, and can paste in all the video links we need to, plus extra helpful notes or instructions (e.g. instead of “do this worksheet”, which has to be printed, it can say “look in your folder for this worksheet” or “ask mama to print this worksheet for you”. Tailored to your home, basically).
We can also use this to plan out what other homeschool activities we are going to be doing in addition to the school-mandated activities, and where / when we will likely be able to do those. We can open this page right from their desktop by using the browser’s “Create Shortcut” function while viewing the online Google doc. We can ensure that the formatting is easy for a kid to read and follow. We can include their e-learning passwords as a reminder at the top of the page. We can also lean on this to swap out who is the school-monitoring parent more easily and with less verbal catchup during the day. If Bek has a meeting, I can just go out to The Learning Zome and the kids can show me where they are on today’s activities. Nice and smooth.
Basic steps to set this up:
1 - Create a new Google doc for each kiddo. Just call it “<CHILDNAME> Homeschool”.
2 - Click the “Share” button in the upper right corner, and invite any other parents or guardians who want or need editing access on the document.
For example, I invited Bekah, since she knows the school website better than I do and has been taking point on the home curriculum.
3 - Use the same “Share” feature to create a view-only, sharable link. Copy that URL to a text file on a USB thumb drive, or find some other easy way to open this URL from the child’s secure laptop.
4 - Open the Google doc on the child’s secure laptop, and use your browser’s “Create Shortcut” feature to make a desktop shortcut. Some browsers also allow you to just click and drag the web address bar to your computer’s desktop.
5 - Now you have desktop shortcuts to unique, read-only, customizable curriculum pages that you can update as often as you need.
If you click that desktop shortcut, it should take you straight to this page:
That’s about it. I’m not sure this is a real galaxy-brain approach, but it should be the fastest, easiest way to get a remotely-editable, machine-specific web page full of links set up for your kiddos. Hope that helps!