Home-schooling is a lot of work. If you're currently a home-schooler, you may have noticed this. If you're just getting started, don't worry, you'll find out soon enough.
We're here to help.
Home-schoolers often struggle with trying to schedule their work so that their children complete all their work in all their classes by the end of the school year. Keeping records of graded assignments and completed classes can also be tedious. Sooner or later you need to produce school records in a neat, clean format -- when your children apply to college, or if at some point they transfer to a public or private school.
SkuleKeeper is a software product that helps you with this record-keeping burden so that you can concentrate on teaching. It has two main pieces: scheduling and grading.
The scheduling function helps you to establish a schedule for each class. Basically, you tell SkuleKeeper how much work there is to do for the year in each subject, and it divides this work evenly over the course of the year, setting due dates for each unit. You can tell it about breaks and holidays so it takes these into account when setting up the schedule. You can accept the generated due dates as is, tinker with them, or you can bypass the automatic dates and set the entire schedule yourself by hand. You then record progress against this schedule, and get a regular display showing which classes you are on schedule, which you are ahead, and which you are falling behind.
With the grading function, you tell the program what graded assignments you have for the year. Quizes, tests, reports, projects, whatever. If you like you can assign each grade a "weight", for example, make the final exam count for more than the regular tests. It then provides a place for you to record grades, computes an average for the year, and assigns a letter grade.
The major reports produced by SkuleKeeper are:
- Weeksheet. Shows what assignments are due each week for each student, as well as past due assignments. When nothing is due this week, it shows the next upcoming due date.
- Report card. Shows grades and credits, along with grade point average, for this year.
- Transcript. Grades and credits for the student's entire career, including total credits and GPA.
SkuleKeeper is a web site. This has some advantages over a product that you install on your home computer. You don't have to worry about installing it: All you need to do is visit the web site. You always have the latest version. Every time there's an update, you're using it. When we add a new feature, you get it automatically. If a software bug turns up, we fix it on the web site and you have the fix. If you have a problem, we can see exactly the same screens that you see, with your data, so we can help you work it out. You can access your data from any computer with an Internet connection, so if you have more than one computer -- or if you're at grandma's this week using her computer -- no problem.
SkuleKeeper was written by a home-schooling father who happens to also be a professional software developer.
|
A subscription to SkuleKeeper is $30 per family per year. Note that's per family, not per student. You can try it out and see how it works by creating a demo account. This is exactly like a real account except that we pre-fill it with data for a make-believe family. (And the account expires in two weeks so you can't use a demo account instead of paying us.) Click here to register or try a demo: SkuleKeeper. |
Key features:
|
Copyright 2009 by Electric Tactics