Google is a blessing for homeschooling families on a budget. The Google search engine allows you to hunt for free homeschooling resources, the Google Alerts app allows you to stay on top of new blog posts and news, the Google Calendar is a fantastic scheduling reminder, and you can access any of the large number of educational videos on YouTube. This alone makes Google invaluable….but wait, there’s more.
Google Books
Have an ebook that you would like your children to read? Upload it to Google Books and allow them to access it on your devices. This way you can have them busy reading in the car while you drive to get the groceries. Plus the books are available to you in digital form at any time and any place without having to bother about carting them around and storing them.
Google Drive
Not sure if you will need to reuse this particular worksheet? Want to save an essay that your homeschool student wrote? Scan it and send a copy to your Google Drive. All the paperwork that takes so much space to store can actually be scanned and stored on Google Drive for future retrieval. Just about any digital document that you deem useful can be easily stored and accessed from here.
Blogspot
Want to start blogging about the homeschool experience? Or encourage a budding poet or author in the homeschool classroom? Start a free Blogspot blog. You can pen your own feelings down, share experiences, and even connect with other homeschool bloggers on Blogspot. What’s more as the popularity of the blog increases, you may even be able to monetize it with Google Adsense, but that is a whole other topic.
Picasa
Visual records of field trips, science projects, and even everyday homeschooling can be stored in online albums. Store and share your images on Google’s photo editor, Picasa. Don’t worry about exposing your images to the entire internet community. You can use the security settings to make your albums public, private and even password protected. That way only the people who you want to see the images can get to see them.
