Oct. 10, 2008 - TOS Crew Review: Help Me To Teach
Although we are using a full curriculum already, I am always looking for ways to supplement it, keep things interesting, and have a little fun. Help Me To Teach is an education-focused, subscription based search engine that I have been given the opportunity to review.
Because we’ve been asked to be honest in our reviews, I’ll start by saying this is not something our family needs enough to pay for. Because we use a curriculum and have moderately good Google skills, we can find what we need fairly easily. And to be honest I personally find Google a little easier to navigate. Some of the sites that come up in HMTT searches are just more lists of sites, and sometimes it seems that this goes on ad infinitum-HMTT gives me a list, and I click on a link which turns out to be another list of links, and I click on a link which takes me to another list of links, and so on.
However, Help Me To Teach may be a very useful resource to families who are putting together their own curriculum or “unschooling” as the case may be. It may also be useful for families who like lots and lots of extra activities and enrichment work. I was pleasantly surprised, for instance, with the links I got when I did some mathematics searches. It gave me fact and information sheets for teaching higher math as some of the top links. Likewise a search for “fall crafts” turned up Kaboose.com with a huge number of craft ideas, some of which we will definately try. Exploring the site more did turn up plenty of helpful sites with various searches. Each link is designated with a letter/symbol so that you can tell at a glance the age or grade it's appropriate for. Of course, as I have a preschooler I searched for “letters” and “alphabet” and HMTT gave me a large number of great links to check out (Seussville.com has to be great, right?). I have also learned that Help Me To Teach is a work in progress, and the owner has proven to be very open to suggestions and comments, which is always a point in favor of a product.
I do think it would be worthwhile to check out the other reviews of this product at the TOS Crew Blog to find out more about Help Me To Teach and the other reviewer’s experiences with it.
