Learning Technology Successes

Technology is a wonderful thing in a lot of ways, when we use it appropriately!

I'm writing this as I'm sitting next to my son who is doing a virtual class with one of his tutors. It's really incredible to think of what has led to this being a widespread and possible thing. One of the best things to come out of the absolute fiasco of 2020 was the expansion of remote learning options into daily options!

I don't normally love the idea of him using technology for these types of things, because children at these younger years need to make sure that their life is focused primarily on paper and in-person instead of virtually. There are a lot of benefits to that compared to the virtual stuff.

There are situations however like this where because he isn't feeling the best, but not necessarily bad enough where we would have to cancel the lesson altogether, we opted for a virtual tutoring session. This is where technology and homeschooling really take off in a lot of ways!

We tried full-time homeschooling last year and the year before and due to various circumstances that I don't want to necessarily add here, we opted for regular in-person school instead, although in a private setting. This is a good thing for him and us so we can get him over the hump of these things and where he needs to be. Eventually I think we will go back to full-time homeschooling.

With the homeschooling and private schooling though, we've maintained a great tutoring company for my son and that's really paid off in spades. In the times where we were exclusively homeschooling, we would use them to supplement for styles and strategies that we weren't the best at and I think this combination worked really well. We tried other tutoring programs as well but they weren't a good fit, so having this one is remarkable for sure.

Combining that with being able to do the lessons either at their in-person facility which we do 99% of the time, having the choice to do a remote session in a circumstance like this is really important.

This is where I know that technology is really an important part of this whole picture. We could have done these things 10 or 15 years ago, but they were certainly more difficult than they are today. With how much technology has progressed, it is really interesting that people still say homeschooling is shit. They always use the ridiculous "socialization" line which is comical at the end of the day.

My son has learned more bad habits at the schools we've sent him to than he's ever learned before. He's a great kid but he's also easily influenced by his peers and has brought home some pretty unfortunate behaviors. We are more in-tune with him than other parents, we would like to think, so we immediately knew where these behaviors came from. So much for the "socialization" of our kids into being better, eh?

We are going to be using this remote option a little bit more in the coming months, especially when we are doing some traveling for some various activities we need to partake in. Having this option to continue his tutoring is going to be a really awesome thing so we don't lose progress!

What about you, do you utilize options like this to supplement your kids learning experience? Let me know in the comments!