Our Family

Our Family

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Technology Can Be a Wonderful Thing




This week's Blog Cruise topic is the use of technology in your homeschool. As I discover quite often (especially this morning ironically enough....don't ask) that technology is a wonderful thing when it is working correctly. I love having a laptop computer and being able to google anything that the children have a question about as soon as they ask it or something that we need to have more information on. Although my fear of the children accidentally clicking on an incorrect link and coming up with something inappropriate, makes using the internet possible only under supervision. There are a few sites that I do let them use (pbs.kids, starfall, spelling city, nickjr, poptropica)as long as they stay on that site. We also have a wireless printer and I love that I can print projects out off my favorite sites from my laptop anywhere in the house.

My digital camera is another one of my favorites. Anyone can take a good picture on a digital camera (and if you didn't you can see it right away and delete it.) Not only is it great taking pictures of the children, but I can also take pictures off all of those Art Projects and Crafts that the children want to keep around forever but we don't have storage space for. After a specified amount of time we take a photograph, add it to their notebooks, and throw the project away.

The Wii and I have a love/hate relationship. Even though we have specific boundaries and rules for playing the Wii, it can still drive me crazy. Not many of the games that we have our educational, but some are very active sports games. Last Fall we had several weeks of down pouring rain and thunderstorms that left us unable to go outside for days at a time. Kids need exercise, so we used some of the Wii Sports, and Wii Fit Games as our P.E. activities. Although it would not have been my first choice for exercise, it really worked in the situation we were in.

Having a DVR is something I never really thought about until we had one. Television commercials have become as bad, if not worse than most of the shows on television. For that reason, if there is something special or eductational on TV, I DVR the shows so we don't have to watch the commercials.

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