There are numerous reasons that parents choose to home school their children. Some children require specialist attention, while others face circumstances
from health to bullying that prevent them from attending a regular school.
Whatever the reason, KS Learning can help to create or implement a home schooling plan to ensure children are successfully educated outside school.
KS Learning has extensive experience supporting pupils that are home schooled with extra lessons and tutorials at its tuition centre and specific
guidance on achieving GCSE and A Level qualifications.
Legal Position
Parents have the right to educate their child or children at home which is known
formally as elective home education or informally home schooling. At the same time, children have the right to an education and it is the responsibility
of local authorities to ensure that this is happening.
The government provides
guidance for local authorities and schools about children
educated at home. It makes interesting reading as it describes the rights and responsibilities of parents and children, and the responsibilities of
local authorities to home schooled children. Many councils
provide excellent support to parents who choose to educate at home - it is well worth contacting them.
Sonia Sodha goes too far in her article "Is the state sometimes wiser than parents?" (Comment). She proposes banning home education and suggests ...
Rise of the home unschoolers
It's Tuesday morning in Coventry and three children are making clay seal pups on the dining table at home. Zephan is four, so his looks a bit like ...
10 good reasons to home school your child
You can work around any work rotas/shifts (although home education only works if one parent isn't in full-time employment so there is a financial ...
DIY schooling on the rise in England
For Marta Drew and her family, it was a difficult decision, but the right one. Eight years ago, she says, her seven-year-old son had been ...
Homeschool Resources
Discuss the many different ways that KS Learning can be of assistance.
Art and Music
Dave Conservatoire
— Dave Conservatoire is an entirely free online music school offering a self-proclaimed
“world-class music education for everyone,” and providing video lessons and practice tests.
Drawspace — If you want to learn to draw or improve your technique,
Drawspace has free and paid self-study as well as interactive, instructor-led lessons.
Justin Guitar — The Justin Guitar site boasts over 800 free guitar lessons
which cover transcribing, scales,
arpeggios, ear training, chords, recording tech and guitar gear, and also offers a variety of premium paid mobile apps and content (books/ ebooks, DVDs,
downloads).
Maths and Engineering
Codecademy — Codecademy offers data science and software programming
(mostly Web-related) courses for
various ages groups, with an in-browser coding console for some offerings.
Stanford Engineering Everywhere — Stanford Engineering
Everywhere houses engineering (software and otherwise) classes that are free to students and educators, with materials that include course syllabi,
lecture videos, homework, exams and more.
Big Data University — Big Data University covers Big Data analysis
and data science via free and paid courses developed by teachers and professionals.
Better Explained — BetterExplained offers a big-picture-first approach
to learning mathematics — often with visual explanations — whether for high school algebra or college-level calculus, statistics and
other related topics.
Web Development
HOW Design University — How Design University (How U) offers free
and paid online lessons on graphic
and interactive design, and has opportunities for those who would like to teach.
HTML Dog — HTML Dog is specifically focused on Web development tutorials for HTML,
CSS and JavaScript coding skills.
Skillcrush — Skillcrush offers professional web design and development courses
aimed at one who is interested in the field, regardless of their background — with short, easy-to-consume modules and a 3-month Career Blueprints
to help students focus on their career priorities.
Hack Design — Hack Design, with the help of several dozen designers around the
world, has put together a lesson plan of 50 units (each with one or more articles and/or videos) on design for Web, mobile apps and more by curating
multiple valuable sources (blogs, books, games, videos, and tutorials) — all free of charge.
General – Children and Adults
Scratch – Imagine, Program, Share —
Scratch from MIT is a causal creative learning site for children, which has projects that range from the solar system to paper planes to music synths and
more.
Udemy — Udemy hosts mostly paid video tutorials in a wide range of general topics
including personal development,
design, marketing, lifestyle, photography, software, health, music, language, and more.
E-learning for kids — E-learning for Kids offers elementary
school courses for children ages 5-12
that cover curriculum topic including math, science, computer, environment, health, language, life skills and others.
Ed2go — Ed2go aims their “affordable” online learning courses at
adults, and partners with over 2,100 colleges and universities to offer this virtual but instructor-led training in multiple categories — with
options for instructors who would like to participate.
GCF Learn Free — GCFLearnFree.org is a project of Goodwill Community
Foundation and Goodwill Industries, targeting anyone look for modern skills, offering over 1,000 lessons and 125 tutorials available online at anytime,
covering technology, computer software, reading, math, work and career and more.
Stack Exchange — StackExchange is one of several dozen Q+A sites covering
multiple topics, including Stack Overflow, which is related to computer technology. Ask a targeted question, get answers from professional and enthusiast
peers to improve what you already know about a topic.
HippoCampus — HippoCampus combines free video collections on 13 middle
school through college subjects from NROC Project, STEMbite, Khan Academy, NM State Learning Games Lab and more, with free accounts for teachers.
Howcast — Howcast hosts casual video tutorials covering general topics on
lifestyle, crafts, cooking, entertainment and more.
General College and University
edX — The edX site offers free subject matter from top universities,
colleges and schools from around the world,
including MIT and Harvard, and many courses are “verified,” offering a certificate of completion for a nominal minimum fee.
Cousera — Coursera is a learning site offering courses (free for audit) from over 100 partners —
top universities from over 20 countries, as well as non-university partners — with verified certificates as a paid option, plus specializations, which group
related courses together in a recommended sequence.
MIT Open Courseware — MIT OpenCourseWare is the project that started the OCW / Open Education Consortium
[http://www.oeconsortium.org], launching in 2002 with the full content of 50 real MIT courses available online, and later including most of the MIT course
curriculum — all for free — with hundreds of higher ed institutions joining in with their own OCW course materials later.
Open Yale Courses — Open Yale Courses (OYC) are free, open access, non-credit introductory courses recorded in
Yale College’s classroom and available online in a number of digital formats.
Open Learning Initiative — Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is
course content (many open and free) intended for both students who want to learn and teachers/ institutions requiring teaching materials.
Khan Academy — Khan Academy is one of the early online learning sites, offering free learning
resources for all ages on many subjects, and free tools for teachers and parents to monitor progress and coach students.
MIT Video — MITVideo offers over 12,000 talks/ lecture videos in over 100 channels that include math,
architecture and planning, arts, chemistry, biological engineering, robotics, humanities and social sciences, physics and more.
Stanford Online — Stanford Online is a collection of free courses billed as “for anyone, anywhere,
anytime” and which includes a wide array of topics that include human rights, language, writing, economics, statistics, physics, engineering, software,
chemistry, and more.
IT and Software Development
Udacity — Udacity offers courses with paid certification and nanodegrees
— with emphasis on skills
desired by tech companies in Silicon Valley — mostly based on a monthly subscription, with access to course materials (print, videos) available for
free.
Apple Developer Site — Apple Developer Center may be very specific in
topics for lessons, but it’s a
free source of documentation and tutorials for software developers who want to develop apps for iOS Mobile, Mac OS X desktop, and Safari Web apps.
Google Code — As with Apple Developer Center, Google Code is
topic-narrow but a good source of
documentation and tutorials for Android app development.
Code.org — Code.org is the home of the “Hour of Code” campaign,
which is aimed at teachers and educators as well as students of all ages (4-104) who want to teach or learn, respectively, computer programming and do not know where to start.
Mozilla Developer Network — MDN (Mozilla Developer Network)
offers learning resources — including links to offsite guides — and tutorials for Web development in HTML, CSS and JavaScript — whether
you’re a beginner or an expert, and even if you’re not using Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.
Learnable — Learnable by Sitepoint offers paid subscription access to an ebook
library of content for computers
and tablets, and nearly 5,000 videos lessons (and associated code samples) covering software-related topics – with quizzes and certification available.
Pluralsight — Pluralsight (previously PeepCode) offers paid tech and creative training content (over 3,700
courses and 130K video clips) for individuals, businesses and institutions that covers IT admin, programming, Web development, data visualization —
as well as game design, 3D animation, and video editing through a partnership with Digital-Tutors.com, and additional software coding lessons through
Codeschool.com.
General – Children and Adults
Memrise — Lessons on the Memrise (sounds like “memorize”) site
include languages and other topics, and are presented on the principle that knowledge can be learned with gamification techniques, which reinforce concepts.
SchoolTube — SchoolTube is a video sharing platform for K-12 students and
their educators, with registered users representing over 50,000 schools and a site offering of over half a million videos.
Instructables — Instructables is a hybrid learning site, offering free online
text and video how-to instructions for mostly physical DIY (do-it-yourself) projects that cover various hands-on crafts, technology, recipes, game play
accessories and more. (Costs lie in project materials only.)
creativeLIVE — CreativeLive has an interesting approach to workshops
on creative and lifestyle topics (photography, art, music, design, people skills, entreprenurship, etc.), with live access typically offered free and
on-demand access requiring purchase.
Do It Yourself — Do It Yourself (DIY) focuses on how-tos primarily for home
improvement, with the occasional tips on lifestyle and crafts topics.
Adafruit Learning System — If you’re hooked by the Maker movement
and want to learn how to make Arduino-based electronic gadgets, check out the free tutorials at Adafruit Learn site — and buy the necessary
electronics kits and supplies from the main site.
Grovo — If you need to learn how to efficiently use a variety of Web applications
for work, Grovo has paid (subscription, with free intros) video tutorials on best practices for hundreds of Web sites.
Project Gutenberg —
Project Gutenberg offers over 54,000 free eBooks to download or read online especially older works for which copyright has expired.
No fee or registration is required.
General College and University
Stanford Online — Stanford Online is a collection of free courses billed as “for anyone, anywhere,
anytime” and which includes a wide array of topics that include human rights, language, writing, economics, statistics, physics, engineering, software,
chemistry, and more.
Harvard Extension School: Open Learning Initiative
— Harvard’s
OLI (Open Learning Initiative) offers a selection of free video courses (taken from the edX selection) for the
general public that covers a range of typical college topics, includings, Arts, History, Math, Statistics, Computer Science, and more.
Canvas Network — Canvas Network offers mostly free online courses source from numerous colleges and universities,
with instructor-led video and text content and certificate options for select programs.
Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple — Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple” is, as the name implies,
a set of just three lectures (plus intro) very specifically about Quantum Physics, form three presentations given by theoretical physicist Hans Bethe.
Open UW — Open UW is the umbrella initiative of several free online learning projects from the
University of Washington, offered by their UW Online division, and including Coursera, edX and other channels.
UC San Diego Podcast Lectures — Podcast USCD, from UC San Diego, is a collection of audio and/or video
podcasts of multi-subject university course lectures — some freely available, other only accessible by registered students.
University of the People — University of the People offers tuition-free online courses, with relatively small fees
required only for certified degree programs (exam and processing fees).
NovoEd — NovoEd claims a range of mostly free “courses from thought leaders and distinguished professors
from top universities,” and makes it possible for today’s participants to be tomorrow’s mentors in future courses.
IT and Software Development
Aquent Gymnasium — Gymnasium offers a
small but thorough set of free Web-related lesson plans for coding, design and user experience, but filters access by assessing the current knowledge
of an enrollee and allows those with scores of at least 70% to continue.
