I figured that if I didn't get a blog entry in here soon you all would assume I died or moved to computer-less jungles of nowhere land. Alas, I am alive and far from computerless.  I have been busy from 6am to 12am daily for months now working on the VHSG online classroom/courses project. It is really looking like it will be a fantastic co-operative for homeschool families.

At the 3 month, alpha test mark, the most developed online class is the K to 3rd Grade Math Meeting. We began as one class which has now divided into 3. You can find the Moodle component of the course here:

http://www.virtualhomeschoolgroup.com/vhsg/course/view.php?id=21

Each of the math classes have a homeroom at the top and then we have a nice collection of  math resources developing in the bottom half. The idea of this Moodle is to allow multiple teachers of K to 3rd grade math work together to develop resources and work with each other to imrove their online teaching of the subject. I think the team approach will be fantastic! I hope to incorporate that into several other courses too.

The alpha phase of the idea has been a terrific success. In the alpha phase the primary function was to see if the online classroom (Elluminate Lite teamed up with VHSG Moodle) would be a stable and successful platform to teach our homeschool kids. They have proven themselves to be an excellent means of providing co-op classes!

Here is a quick screenshot of one of the online classroom math activities that I made:

The kids can move the coins around. We use this screen to practice counting coins, make pretend puchases, and practice counting back change.

Here is a picture from the homemade Battleship game that Timothy, my 12 year old, made for us to use for our online classroom. Didn't he do a fantastic job?!

The little hits (looks like explosions) and misses (looks like splashes) icons up in the right corner can be picked up and placed on the game grid. The kids love it. We will have another set of game days in June. If you missed out on the ones in May, keep tuned in to hear when the next set will be announced. We will also be having our VHSG Open House mid-month as well. This will be for the parents to come into the online classroom to see it and try it out for themselves. They will learn about how we can all pull together to create a really neat collection of virtual co-op courses. I hope to see you there.