 Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be a homeschool show and tell. The homeschool show and tell is an open collaboration hosted by Abby from Rooted and Rest and Myself. Our goal with the homeschool show and tell was really just to show that there's not one right way to homeschool and we do that by bringing homeschoolers together from around the world to share their take on a specific topic. This month's topic is technology and I am so excited because I know that there's gonna be videos this month that are gonna range from people who don't use any technology in their homeschool to people who can't live without it and then everything else in between. So if you're curious about how you can use technology in your homeschool or you want more ideas or maybe you just wanna see what other people are doing, you're not gonna wanna miss all of this month's videos and so I will link the playlist in the description box for you so you can check it out. I personally am excited to watch because I'm hoping for more resources. I'm always looking for new resources and you guys always have some of the best ones. So if you're watching and not participating and you have an awesome technology-based resource, please leave it in the comments so that we can all share in it. Now I know that technology sometimes gets a bad rap and we're always like, oh, we need to limit it or oh, we need to not do this or it's just kind of like viewed negatively but I'm gonna be the first person to tell you that technology hands down is the most used resource in our homeschool. Now don't get me wrong. We use a ton of books and we use a ton of games and we use all of my unit study resources and all of these things but if I had to pick the one thing that we are utilizing the most, it is technology and it is because it is so accessible. Unlike books or games or unit studies or anything else, those are resources I have to either acquire or find or lay hands on or create and that takes time. Time to either place someone hold at the library or time for Amazon to deliver them or my time to make them. And unfortunately, when you are homeschooling and you're trying to homeschool with an interest-led approach, you don't always have time. And I'm not saying you can't homeschool with an interest-led approach without time but you just don't always have time to locate a resource because you might lose your child's interest. For example, during the book and the game just a few weeks ago, we read the book Stella. This book is about a bomb sniffing dog who something happens to and they can no longer do that job and so they are basically sent to a family to kind of rehab them, rehab the dog and come to find out the daughter of the person who's rehabbing has epilepsy. And because this dog is trained with a highly sensitive nose, she can actually smell the chemical changes in the daughter's body and somehow can become an epilepsy dog. They don't know why or how yet but it's kind of what's gonna happen. So we read this book and immediately, because I never know what's gonna spark her interest, she is super curious about how do you become a service dog? What's required to be a service dog? More about that specific breed of dog and all of these questions. And yeah, I mean, I had some dog resources. We had planned to play some dog games but I couldn't answer her questions but you know what, technology could and it can answer them right then and there. I mean, I could immediately search on Google, find a few videos on YouTube for her. We even found a series on Amazon Prime about dogs with jobs and it's all these dogs who have all these different jobs ranging from sheep dog to bomb sniffing dogs to dogs for people with disabilities and we were able to watch all of these episodes because of it. And so I would say the number one reason that technology is used so much in our homeschool is it is just so easily accessible. I can easily find the answers. I can feed her interest. I can fuel that fire and I can do it immediately and I can't always do that with anything else. So that for us is probably the biggest benefit to using technology. Now let's talk about some of our favorite ways to use technology. We use technology, like I said, all the time. Like we literally start our day with our Amazon Dots waking us up gently because we're not morning people. We have Dots in every room of our house, our bedroom, Emily's bedroom, our kitchen, our homeschool room and our living room. And they are programmed with routines that turn the lamps on like really, really low and then slowly make them brighter so that we're being woken up kind of gently and not like with blaring alarms. So even we're just starting our day, gentler because of technology, which then of course means our homeschool days are going smoother because we're not like frazzled and woke up in such a frenzied state that we're like, ah, you know, it's a crazy day. We use them to listen to audio books. Emily uses them for spelling. We use a ton of different skills, which we'll talk about in just a minute. And that's just one device. If we're talking about phones, we use our phones for searches. Obviously I use them to shop Amazon for my homeschool resources. We use them to track all of our fitness stuff because there's apps for that. So we're constantly doing the math for how many steps do you have, how many steps do you not have. Our fitness trackers, our stealthy math, which is also encouraging us to be more active. All of us have laptops. Emily takes online classes. She has a tablet full of a ton of educational apps. I mean, the list can go on and on and on. And I haven't even touched on TVs, streaming services, documentaries, educational shows. Like, there are so many ways that we use it at our homeschool that I don't even realize because it's just become such a natural part of our everyday life. Now I thought I would talk about some of our specific favorites for some of the different ways that we use technology. So first let's talk about educational apps. Now, Emily has a tablet and she has things on there that are not educational but specifically how we use it in our homeschool for education is educational apps. Some of our favorite apps include Dragon Box for math, word scapes, word cookies, or even words with friends for spelling. We will even play each other in some of those games. Emily really likes Hangman, which is another great game to kind of get her to practice spelling and some of those logic skills. Stack the states and stack the countries is amazing for geography. And then there are Scratch Junior is one of our favorite for coding. And then PBS Kids has a ton of videos and games that you can get within an app that are super educational specifically for science. There's a ton of different science games on there. So those are a few of our favorite apps for our homeschool. Now I mentioned that Emily has a laptop and uses it a lot for online classes. Some of our favorite online classes include Chalk Pastel. We really enjoy that for art as well as Masterpiece Society. We like Squilt for music. We like No Sweat Nature Study for nature. Emily has an amazing Lego class that she really enjoys. And then we take a lot of out-school classes as well. One of her current favorites is her book club with Ms. Mary. Those are just a few of our favorite online classes not to mention some of the programs that she uses that are educational based like teaching textbooks for math and night zookeeper and all those are not necessarily online classes but it's almost like a curriculum online. And so that makes it very, very convenient to pretty much put a lesson together on just about anything even if I don't have the resources. Like I said, it's very easily accessible. Like, oh, you're in the mood to learn about snow or snowflakes. Okay, there's probably a lesson in No Sweat Nature Study about that. You wanna do some art. Here's two different places we can come up with art. And I'm not having to worry about not having the resources or even the time or energy to track down a lesson for her. I can just open it up and be like, hey, which one of these looks good? YouTube is another thing we use a lot in our home school. In fact, every single unit study that I create has a YouTube playlist for every single lesson because I find serious value in being able to hear and watch and see things. And that kind of appeals to all types of learners which I really like coming at things for Emily in multi-sensory ways. And I find that YouTube videos do that. And so we watch them a lot in our home school. Some of our favorite channels are SciShow Kids, Home School Pop, Brain Pop, National Geographic, Animal Planet, trying to think of a few other. I have a note here. Let's see, Crash Course Kids. Oh, and Hands Down Art for Kids Hub. We do a lot of drawing with that one too as well. We listen to a podcast or Emily at least listen to a podcast almost every single day during her lunch because we kind of have separate quiet lunches. I normally listen to a podcast of my own while she listens to a podcast of her own with earbuds in. We're normally at the table together but that's kind of our quiet time to recharge and me not have to listen to talking. If you're a mom whose home is going in only, you'll understand why I said that. Some of our favorite educational podcasts are Bedtime History, Brains On, Wow In The World. Let's see, Story Pirates, Sparkle Stories, Greaking Out, Tumble Science. And again, that list goes on and on and on but I will say the one that she listens to the most is Brains On. She loves Brains On and if there is a new episode, that's what she's gonna listen to first. Now, I already mentioned how our Amazon doc helps wake us up gently. We also use it for a ton of other things. We make our grocery list using it because then everybody can add to it. Emily asks her how to spell words. She will ask her the weather, what time it is. If she has a question because I don't always love her searching the internet without me right there beside her. So if she has any kind of random question, she'll ask her first because we have some parental controls there. And we also use it for a ton of Alexa skills, like a ton of Alexa skills. So I'm gonna name off just a few of the ones that we use it for. 20 questions is an amazing one. Animal workout is so fun because you can ask her to give you an animal workout and it's like animal yoga. So Emily really enjoys that. You can do a mad libs on it. You can do SAT word of the day or quizzes of the day. You can do a name that animal where it's like a guess what animal this is and it's yes or no questions. There are also math fact practices as well as math things like math mountain is a really fun game. You can play with it as well. And then we obviously use it for some of the really apparent things like documentaries. CuriosityStream is our absolute favorite for documentaries for homeschool. They're an amazing streaming channel. It's like $20 for the entire year I think. So it's really affordable. And I can pretty much let Emily watch anything on there and know that it's educational and it's not junk and it's gonna be factual and I don't have to like pre-watch it or make sure it's gonna be okay. So that is our absolute favorite streaming channel. Now in addition to that we have Discovery Plus which is another one that she really likes because they have a lot of educational channels within the Discovery Plus. And then we have Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, Prime Video. I'm sure I'm probably missing some but those are some of the ones that we use for education. And I make a list for her. So anytime I see a video or a documentary or something that's educational that I think she'll enjoy on a different streaming service I'll add it to my list so that it comes up kind of at the top of the screen for her. Like if there's new episodes or something I think she'll find interesting that's kind of what I call like digital streaming. I do the same thing with her tablet if I load a new educational app or something I think she would be interested in and I make sure I put it on the home screen for her. Again, it's kind of like digital streaming. And then audiobooks. We have at least one, sometimes multiple audiobooks going at all times. Emily listens to an audiobook of her own in the evenings after I've put her to bed and I'm like, okay, I'm leaving. She can either read or listen to an audiobook until she falls asleep. So she typically has one going for herself. And then we almost always have a family audiobook going, something we will listen to while we're putting a puzzle together as a family or when we're in the car on longer trips we'll listen to something as a family. So we almost always have at least one, possibly two to three audiobooks going at a time. We listen to those in the house using our Alexa dots or Amazon dots and we use them in the car just playing on our phones through Bluetooth. We'll just connect them to the radio in our car, the Bluetooth. The where we get our audiobooks, we are audible members although you don't really need to do that but we are because I like being able to just say Alexa play this book or whatever and I have to fight with connections and stuff. So we use audible. A hoopla is really, really amazing too. And so is Libby. And then some of the last things that we use for tech that we don't use super frequently, well I use super frequently, Emily doesn't use it as much are our Kindles for reading. They're amazing for taking on trips and like just on the go because they're small and you can load as many books or as many things on them as you want. Emily has the Amazon kids on hers so there's already a ton of books for her to choose from. Anytime we go on a trip, they're definitely coming with us. Mine is pretty much with me 24 seven but I definitely take hers on trips with us because it makes it more convenient to read in the vehicle especially if we're driving at night she doesn't have to have a book light and worry about blinding whoever's driving. She can have it turned down low enough for her to be able to read it. Also because at night she can read a book and not have to take six books with her that's just a small little thing. And then also one that I say we don't use frequently but I guess technically we use every day would be our smart watches. Our fitness watches I don't even have mine on right now but we all have the Samsung Galaxy Watch. Before that we had Fitbits and we use them all day every day and yes we use them for education because we are constantly talking about how many steps we have, doing the math to see the difference, encouraging us to go further and stay more active, seeing how many miles we've gone, we have the amount of math and things that we've done with it is crazy. Like we've even figured out the difference in Emily's step versus my step versus Kevin's. So like if she knows how many steps she got from a walk she'll immediately be able to do the math to say how many I got versus how many Kevin got because our legs are different lengths. Anyway it's kind of crazy the amount of learning that has come for that. Now to make things super convenient for you I have actually created a guide to using technology in your home school. It is a free guide. I'm going to link it in the description so you can grab yours today. I go over in this the benefits of using technology in your home school, how we use technology in our home school and all of our tech favorites. So everything that I mentioned and even more is going to be in here. Our favorite audio books, our favorite Alexa skills, our favorite podcast, our favorite YouTube channels, all of it. It's all going to be in here. Super convenient so you can either keep it on your phone or print it out and put it in your planner and basically just have a list of all of these awesome tech resources that you can use in your home school.