Online home school can have many advantages for parents who would prefer their children to be educated in the home environment. Such schooling can take place from nearly anywhere on the globe, allowing kids who pursue special activities, like competitive sports or acting/modeling to work around busy schedules. Alternately kids can work around the busy schedules of parents and still get the education they need from nationally accredited schools.
There are online home school programs beginning in kindergarten and going all the way through high school, and each program may have a slightly different structure. Some online schools may require a child to be working at specific times on the computer, or for certain periods of time, which may not fit the needs or profiles of all students. However, many programs can be time flexible, allowing parents to determine when students will log on and pursue their education.
Perhaps one of the most important issues to parents who home school is creating curricula for their students, and well-meaning parents may fail in this endeavor if they lack enough education to plan a curriculum that would meet the same standards expected of kids in traditional school or simply be challenging enough for their children. This might prove problematic when children either return to a traditional school setting or want to go to college. Using an online home school may solve this problem because a curriculum tends to be planned in accredited schools by licensed and certified teachers and education specialists. Some schools even offer ways to modify lesson plans based on a child’s learning style or special needs, and there are online home school programs tailored to groups that hold various religious beliefs not in keeping with standard public education.
Other advantages to online home school can include fairly low to no cost. Some schools have tuition but it is usually less than private schools. Parents can also choose from a variety of schools available, picking the one that seems most in keeping with their educational philosophies. If schools in a particular district are not up to parents’ standards, they aren’t limited in terms of where they can look online to find one that is.
Online home schools may also provide some structure that parents want in a homeschooling program but haven’t been able to succeed in implementing on their own, and curricula tends to progress in a logical fashion that is similar to standard schools. Curricula may have also have several different tracks, allowing parents to pick whether they want college prep education for their kids or merely work toward gaining a high school diploma. Many schools can administer standardized testing too, to determine if kids are meeting standards as set by a certain state or country.
Benefits of each home school must be weighed against disadvantages. Some parents find programs at certain schools to be too structured or too focused on meeting standards. Even though many of these programs are affordable, they may be financially out of reach of some families. Finding appropriate social environments for kids in home school remains important, and certainly kids who are schooled online should have opportunities for “real world” interaction with peers too.
