Category: Switched On Schoolhouse

I write the Switched-On Schoolhouse Series twice a month to share our family’s experience using this software based curriculum in our home.

One of the “chores” of homeschooling on an administrative end is grading.  Amber has three subjects that we use formal text books for.  I do have answer keys to mark the assignments, but it’s rare that I get to them daily, and they tend to pile up.  Once I get around to grading them, I admit to feeling a little overwhelmed.

As the teacher, I really like the automatic grading feature of Switched-On Schoolhouse.  It makes my job much more enjoyable . 

The way automatic grading works is;

I write The Switched-On Schoolhouse Series twice a month to share our family’s experience using this software based curriculum in our home.

Each lesson in the Switched-On Schoolhouse curriculum is set up relatively the same way (at least in the three high school courses Amber is using, English I, American Literature and Family & Consumer Sciences).

The screen is split in half, with an adjustable interface so the student can make the top half or bottom half taller or shorter in height. 

Welcome back to my Switched-On Schoolhouse Series.  This week I want to share with you the ins and outs of setting up the program on your computer from a parent point of view.

As I had originally said in my first post, Switched-On Schoolhouse can be installed in one of two ways on your computer.  You can install just parts of it, and then run it off of the discs, or you if you have enough room on your hard drive, you can install the entire course right on your computer. 

Optimally you will want to install it completely on your hard drive if you can.  It’s a lot more seamless when using it, and on laptop a lot quieter too!  There’s no waiting for the computer to find the lesson on

In the past few years that we have been homeschooling, for a lot of our subjects I have taken a bit of this and a bit of that from different resources to make up our curriculum.  Now that Amber is officially in high school though and I need to keep a transcript, I wanted a curriculum that would be easier for me to keep track of grades and know that she is covering all the basics that need to be.

That in itself is not a terribly difficult thing to find, but Amber decided she would much rather do her school work on the computer than using text books or work books.  Now our options become much more limited. 

Switched On Schoolhouse (Alpha Omega Publishers) is a complete curriculum, allowing the student to do all of their studies on the