August 21, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 1995 Vol. 4 No. 1
Home Schools On Line
Sidebar for Home Learning, Technology, and Tomorrow's Workplace
The home schooling newsgroup on Internet provides a forum through which educators and others interested in home schooling can share their experiences and seek information. The responses to a brief survey posted on this newsgroup illustrate some of the applications of technology in the home school (contact: misc.education.home-school.misc).
Bill Gidzak is currently teaching his sons programming in Qbasic and C++: “The boys have a good grasp of the languages, but now we want to progress to doing things in robotics. Our proposal is to make robots (out of Legos or whatever), access them through a serial port, and write programs that will manipulate these robots.” Although they are having difficulty finding information on accessing serial ports in Qbasic, their query through the newsgroup may lead them to what they need to know (contact: bgidzak@minet.gov.mb.ca).
James Henderson of Dayton, Ohio, provides a lengthier response. “With proper technology,” he writes, “students from all over can have access to shared material, can share ideas with others from around the world, and can have access to almost anything one might find in a public school. PCs give students computing power unthinkable a decade ago, and educational software allows the student a different ‘teacher’ for a while. [Upon entering the workplace,] the well-equipped home-schooler should be able to walk right into a company, sit down, and use the same software and hardware that they have at home.” For Henderson, a parent with two to three years of homeschooling experience and an instructor of software engineering with a master's in computer science, the ideal home school environment would include cable TV or a satellite dish, a powerful multimedia PC with Internet access service and good software. “Basically, the only thing that a public high school has that we don't is an auto shop, a wood shop, a chemistry lab, and a football team.”
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