Home-schooling your children has a plethora of benefits: from cultivating their minds to learn more than just exam answers, to showing them how education has a place in the real world. However, it can be hard to give your children the same standard of equipment as schools can, especially if you struggle with a tight budget.
IT is becoming more and more important in the classroom, but without the high levels of funding available to schools, you’ll struggle to get the same technology for affordable prices. Luckily, there are ways around this. You can home-school your children, safe in the knowledge that they aren’t missing out anything important.
A lot of schools have a poor curriculum when it comes to IT and technology. This is incredibly worrying, as so many careers in the future will rely on using digital to a very high degree and capability level. So, you’re in a unique position where you can help your children succeed in this area, without being constrained by the curriculum.
Get involved with other home-schoolers
If there’s an app or a piece of technology that you and your children desperately want or need, why not speak to other parents home-schooling their children? It might be that you’re all after the same or similar IT. Then, if that’s the case, you can think about fundraising together and joining your budgets to share the price. Likewise, you may have different things to each other, and could trade IT to give all the children a wider experience. Likewise, if you want to teach your children a valuable skill such as coding, by speaking to other people, you’ll be able to grow a network and find someone with the right skills who can teach your children for you.
Speak to IT professionals
One thing that all schools offer is IT support, and when you’re home-schooling, you won’t have this option. So, you need to know that you can rely on professionals if something awful happens to your technology. From corrupt drives to outdated systems, if you’re not an IT expert, you’ll struggle to fix these quite major problems. While you might worry about the costs of involving an IT service, you shouldn’t. Some companies offer excellent rates for the service they provide, take for example, a hard drive data recovery cost; you can easily find a professional who can give you an estimate depending on what you need doing.
Find out what facilities are available near you
If you’re not sure that you can afford to supply your own technology, above and beyond your personal devices, then you should look at what facilities you have nearby. It might be that you have an excellent public library that you can visit and enjoy. Or, if you’re near to a large university or college, you could try speaking to them about using their facilities. Some colleges have rolled out community schemes to help members of the public get a better grasp of IT – so it’s worth seeing if anywhere near you can offer this.
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