Homeschool Manager
Homeschool Manager is a homeschool planner aimed at families. The service states that it is for “Type-A Moms,” “Short-term Planners,” “Adapting Planners,” and “Purposefully Spontaneous Planners.” [1] Homeschool Manager is a subscription service that costs $49 per year or $5.99 per month (with a 30 day free trial). [2]
As a homeschool planner, Homeschool Manager’s headline feature is its scheduling tool. The product lets users build a schedule for each student in the family. Within the tool, the user views each student’s schedule in a weekly view that presents all of the student’s tasks, assignments, quizzes, and tests. All of these activities are grouped by a school subject.
Aside from the primary feature, Homeschool Manager includes a number of secondary features that are important for managing a homeschool.
Users can generate a variety of reports like report cards, transcripts, and other documents that homeschool families often require.
The service gives users a central dashboard view to see how the school year is going for all their students at once. This dashboard shows overdue tasks and items that need grades.
Compare to School Desk
Homeschool Manager primarily differs from School Desk in its method of building and presenting the schedule.
With Homeschool Manager, the schedule will display the school week and the user will fill in tasks directly for each day.
With School Desk, you create a list of tasks in your desired order, and School Desk will generate the week schedule for you automatically based on the days you pick for your courses to run.
Both services provide reports for important homeschool tracking like progress reports and attendance tracking.
With either service, you can have an unlimited number of students, school years, and anything else that you need to track for your homeschool.
Homeschool Manager includes some unique features. If a student needs to track volunteer hours, Homeschool Manager comes with an ability to track those hours for the student. Additionally, the service has a dashboard to allow users to manage overdue tasks and work to grade. With the service’s model of setting explicit dates, the dashboard is a mechanism to handle those tasks that are set for the past.
In contrast, with School Desk’s automatic schedule building, any incomplete tasks are automatically rolled forward to a future date.
The two services also handle showing multiple schedules differently. Homeschool Manager shows the weekly schedule for one student at a time. School Desk will show you the schedule for all of your students on a single page.
Ultimately, either service can help you manage your homeschool schedule. With a similar set of features, picking between Homeschool Manager and School Desk may come to your preference in how you want to manage your schedule.
If you want very specific control on which exact days you want your students, Homeschool Manager might be a good fit for you.
On the other hand, if you are more focused on the sequence of tasks to complete and you want a service that will build your schedule automatically, then check out School Desk!
Tip
Want to try School Desk to compare for yourself? You can for free! Start your 60 day free trial!