Teaching Online: Homeschooling Book Review

If you’re considering teaching online, or if you’re a homeschooling parent who would like your children to learn online while they’re at home, then you may need to do a little research. You may need to consider what is available and the various hybrid courses and technology issues surrounding the world of Internet courses and online teaching.

The other day, there was a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that discussed why there never had to be bad weather days that prevented you from going to school. If the inclement weather was so bad that the school buses couldn’t run, or the blizzard made it impossible to get to school, then each student could learn at home on her own computer. The article made some compelling arguments, and I found similar points of discussion in a book on the subject.

In fact, I’d like to go out of my way right now to recommend this book to you, and it’s a book I have in my personal library. The name of this book is; “Online Teaching – A Practical Guide” (University Teaching Series – Second Edition) by Susan Ho and Steve Rossen, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MA, (2004), 339 pages, ISBN: 0-618-29848-7.

There is a great overview of online teaching and what it is all about, and although it is written from the perspective of the institutional educator, it surely helps parents understand what they are up against when choosing which courses, online syllabi and information. They want their children to read and learn. Teaching in an online classroom is not easy, but those who have the skill and talent to pull it off are the most desired and sought after instructors.

Why not pick up a copy of this book so you can familiarize yourself with the high-tech and low-tech solutions used in Internet education? You can also find discussion forums where you can interact with teachers and how they use whiteboards, chat features, and instant messaging to make the online classroom feel like home. Why not learn what teachers go through when they put together their training programs and how they prepare for their students?

I find that as a parent, I want to know how the online teaching system works, what kind of software and hardware work best, and how the teachers are going to interact with my children. You need to know these things in advance, it’s very important, and that’s why I recommend this book to you. In fact, I hope you will please consider all of this and think about it.