Homeschool Minder
Homeschool Minder is an online homeschool planner, started in 2012, that wants to help a user “be a better teacher.” Homeschool Minder is a subscription service that costs $39.99 per year or $4.99 per month (with a 30 day free trial). [1]
The service includes a robust calendar feature to show events and activities. A user of Homeschool Minder registers students with individual courses for a school year. These courses are applied to different terms in the school year.
To add work, users create instructional plans and assignments for lesson plans that are part of a course. These lesson plans are scheduled into the school year with some advanced calendar options to set recurrence and when the instructional plans should occur.
In addition to lesson plans, Homeschool Minder users can track student skills and map activities to standards and goals. This mode in the service lets users monitor other growth goals of students that exist outside of classroom contexts.
Beyond the scheduling capabilities, Homeschool Minder has a gradebook to view and manage student assessments. The grading tools in the service support custom weighting and scales.
Compare to School Desk
Homeschool Minder and School Desk both want to help you plan your homeschool year, but with very different strategies.
With Homeschool Minder, users have a huge array of options. Homeschool Minder has a variety of different event types (including custom event types) and activities. The service includes many different methods of tracking student work and is extremely granular in that tracking. For the ultra detailed user who wants to have complete control, Homeschool Minder may be an excellent fit.
School Desk aims for simplicity first and foremost. Because of the focus on simplicity, School Desk offers fewer ways to track and manage activity. This simplified flow provides you with the core tools you need to run a homeschool without extra features that may be overkill for your school year. School Desk is ideal for a homeschool family that wants to plan without the burden of extra management.
Both School Desk and Homeschool Minder include:
Unlimited students
Scheduling tools to see the school activities of your students
Reports to show progress, attendance, and more
Aside from all the extra tools and layers that Homeschool Minder offers, School Desk and Homeschool Minder differ substantially in how the schedule is created.
With Homeschool Minder, the lesson plans and their set dates and calendar rules determine what appears on the schedule.
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.
The design of School Desk lends itself to families that want a great tool to manage their school year and no confusing fluff. If that sounds like you, 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!