New HomePage Design Coming This Weekend

We hope to launch a new homepage design this weekend. We have:

• made it easier for parents to see the Price, Support, and FAQs pages.
• placed our feature video on the front page
• generated the course catalog automatically
• provide detailed views of some courses in the course catalog

The Parent and Student Login buttons are now in the upper right corner of the page.

We hope this new design makes it easier for parents and students to learn about our system and to find answers to their questions. Let us know what you think.

Transcripts

Parents have asked us if HomeSchool Advantage offers transcripts.
Over the holidays we added a feature that we hope will meet your transcript needs.

The students' Trophy Room can now display a detailed transcript of everything the student has seen.

On the upper right corner of the Trophy Room the students can select to see the "details" of the Trophy Room.

The details provide a detailed transcript of every subject the student has seen and every fact in that subject, plus the facts' Mastery Level captured in stars.

We include the number of facts learned and the number of questions answered for each subject.

This transcript may be printed and placed in a binder to capture all of the work the student has done in HomeSchool Advantage. Creating a detailed and very exact transcript of everything that was learned.

Two New User Features

We have released two new features in HomeSchool Advantage today. These are important changes that homeschool parents have specifically requested.

Parents now have two new settings for each student:

Setting #1: Worksheet Size Limit
Setting #2: Allow Fill-in-the-Blank Questions

Worksheet Size Limit

Up until today, we allowed a student's daily worksheets to grow to an unlimited size. This can be a problem if the student has been on vacation or only uses the system occasionally. You may now set a maximum size for the daily worksheet to be as small as 25 questions. This limits the size of the worksheet for each subject.

If you set the limit to 25 questions, the Spelling Worksheet could be up to 25 questions, the History Worksheet could be up to 25 questions, the Vocabulary Worksheet could be up to 25 questions, and so forth. No worksheet could be, say, 30 questions.

Consider limiting worksheet sizes for younger students and for students who have issues focusing for longer periods of time.

Allow Fill-in-the-Blank Questions

This option turns on fill-in-the-blank questions. If this option is not turned on, then we will not display a fill-in-the-blank question as long as there is an alternative available (True/False or Multiple Choice).

Spelling and some Math Drill courses will always use fill-in-the-blank questions because True/False or Multiple Choice display options are not available on these courses.

Turn on this option for students who can type and spell well, and who thus can quickly answer fill-in-the-blank questions.

Your Children's Settings

These new features have a default value which we automatically selected based on your students' ages. We suggest that you log in using your parent username and look at your students' settings to ensure they are what you desire. Click on "Edit" by each student to see and change these settings.

Course Content Preview

We've added preview links to each course in the Assignments page.

A parent can now preview the facts in each course by clicking on the course name.

This is especially helpful when assigning a new Spelling courses to young students. The parents can quickly preview the words in each course to see if they are at an appropriate level for the student.