When I started this blog years ago, I had several purposes. One was to have one blog where I collected my thoughts and received input on how best to communicate with the Time4Learning members.  A second reason was to understand how homeschoolblogger worked. And more generally, to get a feel for blogging.

I think I'll take a quick inventory of my situation against these original goals.

Time4Learning continues to have good day-to-day  direct communication with members. We probably received 100 phone calls per day and 250 emails. We answer them all in house and mostly, we end each day by returning each email.  Additionally, we have rapid follow-up on issues that need to be escalated and we notice patterns so that if there is a technology issue, we find out about it sooner rather than later.

The Time4Learning parents discussion forum has grown to where it is a very pleasant and active community.  I moderated it with Jen for the first six months. Then, we reached out to some active users and asked if they would like to be moderators. This has worked out very well primarily due to the really high quality people that we hooked up with. Also, frankly, it helps that we pay everyone always very promptly and as promised. I'm very old fashioned that way. I keep my commitments low and I ALWAYS meet them.  We now have subcategories on the forum about Christian Homeschooling and how Time4Learning fits (or doesn't. We are a standards-based curriculum); special needs education discussion, Supplemental Resources, WAHMs, WOHMs and other Working Parents , and State by State Homeschooling Info .

We tried in a number of ways to have a periodic chat on the forum. We put up a great technology for it but never really mustered much of a response or crowd so we stopped it. 

We've put putting together homeschool state reps for Time4Learning and it's been slow-going getting them selected with their information posted on our website. It should accelerate over the next 30 days. 

As I look over the old posts, I use to think a lot about a chat service right on our website to ask questions and a formal customer relationship management system. In fact, we built our own database for tracking and emailing our customers so we didn't have to buy one.  And we prefer having people call us to chatting with us.  Frankly, we like to talk with the.

Bottom line: Situation is good.  But I'll keep thinking about it.