Little Bears Family Homeschool Homepage

Welcome to the Little Bears family's website
on Elective Home Education in the UK!

The UK is currently in the throes of what amounts to a very biased government review of Home Education law, and one of the questions that has been thrown into the pot is what is a suitable education for the 21st century.

I've been having an interesting conversation online with a real-life friend of mine who is a 'learning technologist'. She believes - with a passion - that today's schools prepare children perfectly for life - in the 1890s! She also believes that what is needed is technology, and lots of it! To be specific, social media - Web 2.0 collaborative learning & networking technologies, and among the best of these she suggests the following:

- YouTube
- Animoto
- Blogs
- Twitter
- wikis

Of course, homeschoolers in the US and home educators in the UK are already well connected through things like yahoo groups, curriculum forums, and the newer Ning communities such as the Homeschool Lounge, the Home Ed UK Network and so on.

I'd also like to add a couple of resources to the list of learning technologies which look interesting or useful:

- VoiceThread
- Piknik
- Mindmeister & similar
- Diigo (Delicious, Digg etc.)
- Etherpad
- Cover It Live

I've also heard good things about

- Moodle and
- Elluminate

but I'm not sure how appropriate these would be for children who are learning at home autonomously (as most UK home educators do), I would need to investigate further how these can be used.

Take a look at the following video, and consider these questions: are the issues being raised in the video relevant to home education or not (and if not, why not), if they are relevant, how do we address them? If our children are learning autonomously, how does that figure in - how and where do we draw the boundaries, keep them safe, ensure that if they choose to game, facebook, blog, twitter or whatever (and apologies to prescriptive grammatists there for my verbal use of the words 'game' and 'facebook' !), that they are getting something educational out of it or should we be encouraging a balance between all this and learning in more traditional ways?

Something I've been working on lately has been to try and encourage the home educated children themselves to get involved with collaborative projects such as wikis (I particularly like wetpaint) but the response has been surprisingly slow and half-hearted.

I'm interested to know other people's views on technology, and what might constitute an education that would prepare children who are studying now and in the 2010s for life in the 2020s, 2030s and beyond.

And which technologies do you consider to be crucial, interesting or useful?

Or, conversely, should we be looking the other way - going back to basics completely, making sure our children get a good grounding in classical or traditional education?

Is there a balance to be found?

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