It Has Become a Piece of Technology our Homeschool Can’t do Without

You almost can’t get away from it. Technology that is.

People are starting to write books and create movies about “Have we gone too far?”

Meaning is technology taking over our lives?

Our pastor at church often preaches about how technology can be both a blessing and a curse.

You see used in the right way technology can be a great teaching tool or something else as useful. Used in the wrong way? Well just watch the national news sometime and you’ll see what can happen when technology is used for evil.

We use technology every day in our homeschool. I’m quite a bit thankful for it because we use a DVD homeschool program. Without technology we would not be able to plug in our DVDs and watch our lessons.

But this year we’ve actually been doing a lot less DVD watching and Mommy (that’s me) has been doing all the presentation.

You would think that would mean technology took a major back seat in our homeschool. Right?

Not quite.

This year the Kindle is a new addition to our homeschool day.

You see I used to think that I NEEDED some sort of tablet. I mean I had to have one! Everyone had some sort of digital tablet, be it iPad or Kindle but me. Oh I was missing out!

But then, low and behold, I was surprised with a Kindle last summer. It was a blessing and a shock and I thought, “How wonderful!” I quickly got familiar with my Kindle and filled it up with all kinds of books and apps. All the gadgetry a not so little girl could want. Right?

Well sure. I mean I could carry tons of books with me wherever I went and take it on the road. My daughter could play with the Zillow app and search Redfin on the touchy web browser (she thinks she’s a real estate agent).

But what about my big need for a tablet? What was it I needed it for in the first place?

Truthfully I could not remember why I had wanted a tablet in the first place. My daughter seemed to use it much more than I and all I did was read books on it….

Aha! Books!

Fast forward to the beginning of our homeschool year.

We use BJU Press distance homeschool option. We love it. We ALL learn so much and it’s fun. It’s not easy, but it’s fun. Each year when I order the curriculum I get several big boxes of DVD’s, work texts, teacher texts, textbooks, reading books, and any manipulatives we may need, usually with Math. But for some reason this year when the UPS man dropped off our boxes there seemed to be less of them. Less boxes. Hmmm….

I didn’t think too much about it until I started diving through the stuff and checking off what we had received.

Oh! What’s all these CDs? Okay. The teacher texts on CD in addition to the hard copy…

Wrong!

This year there’s been a change. Now all of the teacher texts are on CD and “You will no longer receive a printed copy.”

Eeeekkk!

I was a bit miffed but quickly rallied. Since we were using the DVD’s I only needed to read through the teacher texts and make sure the stuff was all set up for the classes.

But then we had a change.

The Sweet Peanut and I found it more fun for mommy to teach the classes using the ….Teacher’ss Texts. But they were all on CD and as nice and small as I once thought my laptop was when it came time to lug it to our pint sized classroom it became a weighty heavy thing that I wanted no part of.

Aha! The Kindle. But how could I get something off a CD and on to the Kindle? They don’t exactly have a disk drive.

Enter Send to Kindle for Mac (psst! There’s one for PC too).

This snazzy app sits on my laptop and allows me to transfer files to my Kindle. They show up right on the Kindle desktop. Wheee….!

Now I go through the classes with my Kindle in hand. I can zoom in and show Peanut portions of text (BJU Press has locked down all the Teacher Texts. I aim to talk to them about that). It holds all our classes but weighs…(well I don’t know what it weighs but it’s light) a tiny amount.

It’s not at all how I envisioned using my Kindle. It came in handy for a need I had no idea I was going to have. And it has become an important tool in our homeschool day.

You can find out how other homeschool families use Technology in their homeschool by clicking the banner below.