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Product Overview
Free Trial
Subscriptions Using HomeSchool Advantage
Other Questions Product Overview Q: Is this a complete curriculum? A: No, we are not a complete curriculum. We are supplemental to your primary curriculum. We are an automated tutor that teaches your students individual facts. Our tutor customizes worksheets based on how each individual student is learning. We tutor on tens of thousands of facts covering Geography, History, Math, Science, Social Studies, Spanish, Spelling, and Vocabulary. Worksheets are customized for each specific student on each specific day, based on what is assigned and on what the student is most likely to forget without immediate review. Student forget 80% or more of what they learn in just 30 days, with our automated tutor they can retain and recall it all. A few very narrowly focused subjects such as spelling are covered so completely that no additional curriculum is required. Q: What age is a good age to start using a supplemental tool like HomeSchool Advantage? A: Our recommended age for starting HomeSchool Advantage is seven or eight, depending on the child. These students are typically assigned 100 level courses. Using an on-line tool like HomeSchool Advantage requires fundamental skills such as basic reading, using a mouse, and using a keyboard. Many children are ready to do all of these by themselves at seven or eight. Others are not. However, our curriculum does include material for students that young. HomeSchool Advantage incorporates basic testing concepts that may be new to young students such as how to answer Fill-in-the-Blank Questions, True/False Questions, and Multiple Choice Questions. An adult working with a student can quickly explain these types of questions. If a younger child is not ready to use the computer themselves, but they are capable of handling the curriculum, some parents operate the computer for the students. They read out loud the questions and enter in the student's answers. In these cases, the parent can still leverage HomeSchool Advantage's advanced spaced repetition, tracking, and scheduling capability. A guided session with a parent is a great way for a student to learn the names of things, people, and places, before they can even spell! By the time most children are in the third to fourth grade, they can typically use the system without assistance. Q: Will you be adding more facts to your website? I started my trial yesterday and am learning the facts along with my kids. I worry that if we sign up for a year that we'll run out of facts. A: There are two important parts to the answer to your question. There are currently over twenty-two thousand facts in HomeSchool Advantage that every child should know before they graduate from HomeSchool. Our goal is to have over 30,000 facts. So we will be adding at lot more over the coming days, weeks, months and years to keep you challenged for years to come. We are trying to be careful not to fill HomeSchool Advantage with a lot of noise. Ever fact that gets added to HomeSchool Advantage is something that is really worth learning and remembering. That is why we are cautious and deliberate when adding new facts. Our goal is Quality not Quantity. I will be sending you an article to read this month about Knowledge Nets that more fully explains why quality is so important to creating a brilliant student. Of course, we are always taking suggestions from parents on new content to add to HomeSchool Advantage. This leads to the second part of my answer. If you were to learn 3,000 facts in the next six months you are still far from done. Without review, almost all of these facts will be lost within the following year. To create brilliant students, we have to make sure they do proper follow-up and review of what they have learned. This is really the secret of HomeSchool Advantage. We automate the review of all learned facts in a way that is optimal for each individual student. This way, the student will actually remember the facts for a long time to come. The more they review the fact, the longer they will remember it. When your student is 18 years old, they will not be saying "I learned all the countries of Asia when I was 10, but I have forgotten almost all of them." Instead they will say, "I first learned all of the countries of Asia when I was 10, and I still know them." This requires review over the years. And what HomeSchool Advantage provides in addition to the original learning opportunity is rapid and efficient review over the years. Because we provide this review, what is learned with hours of effort when the child is 10 years old can still be remembered when the child is 18! Why? Because a few minutes are spent each and every month reviewing and reinforcing what was learned from the time you student learned the fact at age 10 until they become 18. This is the secret of a brilliant student, and this is true advantage provided to your students by HomeSchool Advantage - optimal review over the years. So we would hope, even after you have learned all 30,000 original facts, that you would continue to find value using HomeSchool Advantage to keep those facts fresh and current for years to come! Q: Do I need to install software? A: No. All software is located on our servers. You access the system with an id and password. Mom and Dad should use the same parent id and password to make assignments and monitor student progress. Each student should have their own id and password. Q: What are the system requirements? A: Here is what is required:
Q: Are my kids limited to accessing the system through the same computer? A: Students may login from any computer in the house or even one from the library. They can use different computers without worry, and they may login simultaneously. Free Trial Q: How does the Free Trial work? A: During the trial period, you and your students have full access to the system. You as the parent can enroll students, assign courses to them, and monitor their progress. Your students can sign in at any time to do their workbooks. Your family will be able to use the system in exactly the same way that fully paid subscribers do. Q: Do I need to enter any credit card information to start the free trial? A: No. To start your free trial, all you have to give us is your email address. Q: What happens at the end of the trial period? A: If your family does not wish to use the system again, nothing happens. You do not get billed for anything. You may get a couple of email reminders about your trial subscription coming to an end, which you can ignore if you chose. If one of your students tries to login after the trial subscription expires, then he or she will get a message on the screen for the parent. You as the parent may also get an email saying one of your students tried to login after the trial was over. Q: How do I activate my account after the trial period? A: Login as a parent after the trial expires, you will see a message on the screen instructing you on how to place a full subscription through PayPal. This will involve choosing whether you want a monthly or annual subscription, and then going through a couple of extra pages of forms at the PayPal site in order to place a credit-card subscription. Subscriptions Q: Can I pay by check? A: Yes. We have an option for paying for a one-year subscription via check. Send the check to the following address: HomeSchool Advantage 2570 Packard Ann Arbor, MI 48104 Just email us at support@homeschooladvantage.com that you have sent the check and we will activate your account. Q: What is your cancellation policy? A: Payment is handled through PayPal, users have complete control of their payment subscriptions via PayPal. Monthly subscribers may cancel at any time. The most recent monthly payment is not refunded, the expiration date is set to be a month from the last payment. Yearly subscribers may cancel at any time. The most recent yearly payment is not refunded, the expiration date is set to be a year from the last payment. Make sure you want to pay for a whole year befor selecting the yearly payment option. The yearly payment option is discounted to promote a whole year of use. If you accidentally pay for a renewal year, and do not want that renewal, that payment will be refunded if we are notified within 30 days and the account was not used during that period. To prevent an accidental yearly renewal, users may simply cancel your PayPal subscription after you subscribe for a year. At the end of the year, you will be asked to resubscribe. The risk of canceling a yearly subscription is that if you decide to resubscribe in a year, the price may be higher. Whereas, if you maintained your yearly subscription, you would automatically be renewed at the same rate for the second year. We will maintain the yearly rate you signed up with for two years, and the monthly rate for twelve months. Any changes in rates will require that you personally resubscribe. When you are finished subscribing through PayPal, you will then return to the HomeSchool Advantage site. Once the subscription is in place, PayPal will automatically renew your subscription by billing your credit card monthly or annually, depending on which option you chose. This continues until you cancel the subscription. Using HomeSchool Advantage Q: Something has happened and we can't login. How do we fix this? One of our kids was using the system earlier today, and now nobody can do anything. All they can do is go to the home page and the informational pages. Help! How can we log in? A: Sometimes, if a HomeSchool Advantage user stops working to switch to some other website but does not log out from HomeSchool Advantage, it leaves the browser thinking that you are still logged in. The fastest way to fix that is to click on this link: http://www.homeschooladvantage.com/users/xlogout Doing so should "unlock" your computer so that you can log in again. Q: I have forgotten the password to my parent account. How can I get that reset? A: Go to the Parent Login page, and find the link that says "Forget your password?" Select the link and follow the instructions. Q: Why isn't HomeSchool Advantage asking my student more questions? It seems to only give you a couple questions about the oceans and then says you're done for the day. Can't we finish the whole lesson? Is it set up to give you only a bit a day, and we should do a bit of each subject? A: As you have already seen, our courses are broken into small sets of 2 to 5 facts, and we only introduce one such set of new facts per day in any one subject. For courses that are aimed at the lower grades, we typically keep the average number of new facts in such sets down to 2 or 3. (That is the case for the Oceans course you were looking at.) Introducing too many new facts at once actually works against good learning. Trying to go too fast quickly turns into ordinary cramming, which does not lend itself to long-term retention. It is far better to introduce only a few facts every day, but to be very systematic and diligent about doing that, as well as reviewing previously learned facts. Another thing to keep in mind is that even though the number of new facts each day stays small, daily worksheets steadily grow in size as the student continues to use the system. That's because HSA will also keep bringing up facts which are due for review. Take a look at this graph, which illustrates what happens to the size of a worksheet for a single subject when we introduce 4 new facts per day. You can see that by the end of 200 days (roughly the length of a school year), the student will have largely mastered 800 facts (4 facts/day times 200 days), yet each student's daily worksheet is usually 50 or fewer facts, and only 3 to 5 of those are new on any given day. 
Q: How can my student avoid unnecessary fact reviews? Sometimes my daughter comes upon questions about a fact that she knows so well that she really doesn't need to review it at all. This is especially true for some of the single digit math facts. Is there some way to get rid of those questions so that she doesn't have to keep answering them? A: One way to eliminate undesired questions in Math is to assign only the Math content that your student needs to learn. We have broken up all of the early math courses in a way to make it easy, for example, to skip the 0's and 1's and 2's for addition. Just take a look at the Assign Courses page for your student. Your student can also delete facts so that she will no longer be quizzed on that fact ever again. For example, suppose your student knows the fact 0 + 0 = 0 very well. If she hits the delete button, then she will no longer see that fact at all. The delete button is at the left end of the menu bar at the top of quiz pages, and looks like a circle with a slash through it. You can also change the frequency in which facts are reviewed. There is an option called Rate-this-fact located at the bottom of the page. It looks like this:  This "widget" will appear only if a question is answered correctly. The number of blue boxes indicates how well the system thinks the student knows this fact. The student can change this by clicking on different boxes. The more blue boxes there are, the less frequently your child will be tested on this fact. If all of the boxes are blue, this indicates that your child knows the fact so well it that it will not come up for review again for a number of months. Q: What happens when we go on vacation? Will my kids get way behind? A: HomeSchool Advantage only introduces new facts if the student is ready to learn them. So, if your family is on vacation for a couple of weeks, the system will not stack up a big backlog of facts for your students. In fact, when your students return to using the the system regularly, it may be a few days before they start seeing new facts. Instead, the system will probably just quiz them only on review facts until they are caught up with those. Then it will start introducing new facts again. Still, it would not be a good idea to skip using the system for a long period, say, several months. HomeSchool Advantage is based on the philosophy that if you are not reviewing, you are probably forgetting. The system tries to schedule the review of facts so that quizzes happen before the student is likely to forget the facts. While your students are on vacation, they are not getting behind in the sense of missing new material. However, they are missing reviews of facts that need review. The longer the break, the more facts are at risk of being forgotten. Q: How can I start my student over in a course? He got off to a bad start and wants to go back to the beginning and try again. A: Go to your Student List page, and then click on the Assign Courses link for your student. On the Assign Courses page, find the course in question, and uncheck it. Then click the Save button. That will delete all of the facts for that course which your student has been learning, both in the worksheet and in the accumulator for that subject. Then click on the Assign Courses link again. On the Assign Courses page, find the course again, re-check it, and then click the Save button. The next time your student logs in, they will start over at the beginning of that course. Q: How can I keep my student from getting too many questions? It's gotten to the point that each worksheet has over 50 questions and it's taking our kids a long time to work through all of that material. I don't want them to get tired of using the system. A: You are absolutely right. It's important that the students not get tired out because of using the system. Fortunately, it's easy to limit the daily worksheet size. Go to your Student List page, and then click on the Edit link for your student. On your student's Edit Student page, find the pulldown menu for Worksheet Size Limit. Select the worksheet size that you want your student to have, and then click the Save button. The next time your student logs in, the system will restrict the worksheet size to that limit. (If your student has already logged in today, then the limit will kick in on the next day they login.) There is one important detail to remember. Because your student clearly has a pretty sizable body of facts in the accumulator, there will probably be a lot of facts scheduled for review each day. If the student's worksheet size limit is less than the number of review facts scheduled for the day, then the system will not give them any new facts. Instead, they will see a message that says "No New Facts Today: The number of scheduled review facts exceeds your maximum worksheet size. Therefore, we will not automatically add any new facts today." This is perfectly normal. This may happen for a few days until the student has worked through the backlog of scheduled review facts. By default, this option is set to the 25-fact limit for students age 8 and under. For other students, the default is an unlimited number of facts. Q: Can I turn off the fill-in-the-blank questions? My student has difficulty with typing, and is getting frustrated because he knows the right answer but often cannot type it. A: This is easy to take care of. Go to your Student List page, and then click on the Edit link for your student. On your student's Edit Student page, find the checkbox for Allow Fill-in-the-Blank Questions, un-check it, and then click the Save button. The next time your student uses the system, they will not get any fill-in-the-blank questions unless the system has no other option. Some courses, such as all of the Spelling curriculum, are set to have only fill-in-the-blank questions, so the system has to show those. By default, this option is set off for students age 8 and under. Q: In the Spanish courses, must the student include any accent marks in order for the word to be counted as correct? A: The Spanish course will accept the American spelling as being correct as well. The accents are there for those who really want to learn how the word is written in Spanish. Q: How can my students win trophies and ribbons? A: A student earns a trophy for a course when they have answered a question at least once for every fact in the course. On the next day that the student logs in after answering that last fact, the new trophy will be visible on the My Trophies page. Moving the mouse over a trophy pops up the name of the course it represents and the date that the trophy was earned. If your students keep using HomeSchool Advantage, they will eventually accumulate hundreds of these trophies! We also provide two kinds of ribbons to represent shorter-term accomplishments. On the student's My Worksheets page, they will see a large green ribbon for every subject worksheet that they have completed that day. If a student has not started a subject worksheet, the ribbon will be very faint. If the student has started working on a subject, but has not yet finished it, then we say that the subject is 'In Progress', and the ribbon will be a light green. When students have completed all of the assigned worksheets for a given day, then they will also earn a daily ribbon. These ribbons appear at the bottom of the My Trophies page. Moving the mouse over a ribbon pops up the date that the ribbon was earned. By the way, we never say that students earn trophies because they have 'finished' a course. That's because it takes a long time to truly finish a course. Remember, just because you have correctly answered a question for each fact in a course, you cannot assume that you will remember these facts five years from now. Rather, you need to keep reviewing these facts at increasing intervals. HomeSchool Advantage will keep track of when you need to review these facts, and will quiz you on them again before you are likely to have forgotten them. That review process helps 'engrave' each fact more deeply in your mind. And if you got the answer wrong, well, clearly you needed to review the fact! If you keep using this system, you will keep seeing these facts, say, once every year or so, just to make sure that you don't lose your hard-earned knowledge. And, that is the only way one could ever learn 30,000 facts! Q: What are the points for? A: The points that HomeSchool Advantage displays are just for fun. They provide a way for a student to measure how much work they have done since they started, or even just today. It really is special for a student to see their grand totals climb week after week: 5000 points, 50000 points, 100000 points, 200000 points.... In fact, we have students who have been working over a year on HomeSchool Advantage who have now earned over 800,000 points! The student earns points by answering questions. The number of points earned depends on the kind of question. You get some points just for answering a question, even if you get it wrong. A multiple choice question is worth more than a true/false question. And a fill-in-the-blank question is worth more than a multiple choice question, but only if you answer it! If you leave the answer space blank and click Next, you earn zero points!. When the student gets to the end of a subject worksheet, there is a summary page showing some simple statistics, one of which is how many points were earned. If the student wants to earn more points, they can click on the Add more facts to today's Worksheet link to get some more new facts. Students really should do that only if they are not feeling challenged enough. Instead, they should click on the Review today's _____ facts again link. This takes them back to the beginning of the worksheet, so that they can answer all of the questions again. Students can always review worksheets again if they think they need the review, or if they want to earn more points. There is a summary on the My Worksheets page that shows how many points and trophies the student has earned. It shows both the grand totals, and the number of points and trophies earned just today. One can also see point totals by subject by going to the My Trophies page. Other Questions Q: I don't see my question here. How can I ask it? A: Fill out this form and click the Send button. We will look at your question and try to answer it as soon as we can. |
