My kids have had access to computers and such throughout their "school" years, for use with educational games, word processing programs, and research. But I was just as surprised as anyone when my 15 year old expressed an interest in building a website based on his passion - 'ukulele. Together with a homeschooled friend, they've developed liveukulele.com where they feature 'ukulele tabs, songs, artists, and commentary. The funny thing is that novice *adults* are contacting these kids, seeking information!

Through this site, my son has learned about building websites (including writing a little bit of code), the importance of clear communication, and best yet - he's doing TONS of writing. Who could have guessed?

My son was part of an on line school and that was way too much "on-line" work. example-science is hands on not read on line. I love being able to immediately access information. We use tv/dvd also. My son is thinking about going to pod camp this summer.

I'll use asterisks to try to mark the paragraphs, which I know the SLJ blogs have trouble with. ***The kids have much less direct access to the computer and technology than I do, and that's a conscious decision. I've used the community to help build a secular home schooling community for us, between Yahoo home school groups and blogs. We use the library system's online database to order books and place holds, which is a great timesaver and opens up what we can find, beyond our own little library. ***When the kids are memorizing poetry, I can find, download, and burn to CD lovely audio presentations from LibriVox (I can also find audio versions of books we're reading, or podcasts on just about any subject, so we can listen in our truck or the kids can listen at bedtime). ***The kids use a few free online resources, notably Timez Attack for multiplication, and the BBC's typing program. ***And back to poetry again, I learned about Fibs from Gregory K's blog GottaBook (gottabook dot blogspot dot com) the other year, and had the kids write some. When I included the results in a blog post, Greg directed a NY Times reporter writing about the new Fib rage toward us, and my daughter's poem was published in the Old Gray Lady, which we all thought was pretty nifty. ***Becky at Farm School (farmschool dot wordpress dot com)

Hi Amy! as longtime homeschoolers and full time geeks, here's an essay / brain dump.
We're used technology in our home since the beginning as it is part of our lives. Not sure if you knew, but I'm the admin over at homeschooljournal.net My hubby and I set that up for other homeschoolers. Our children all have blogs on the system, even the 7 year old. We've counted blog posts for "English class".
When Daddy has worked on jobs away from the home, the kids have used g-chat to talk to him.
I made a simple HTML start page for the kids that lives on the desktop and when they fire it up, contains links to approved game sites.
My 17yo daughter is just across the room form me, yet we twitter at each other through the day, and email links back and forth.
yes, we use wikipedia as a general source of information, as well as youtube.
Recently our local community center was given a bunch of old computers and my oldest daughter set them all up, determined which ones worked and how to fix the others, and set them up. She even took one apart. (and put it back together).
We're also a big time gaming family, mostly on the computer and online. there's a lot of games like age of empires and civilization that are highly educational when you get into it. The kids would have never learned about the Carthaginians otherwise. ;) Hubby taught game design & programming at a local college for a few years. Our oldest, our only son, is finishing up at another college as a computer programmer. Two of my daughters take pictures with the digital camera (yes, they are "allowed" to use it) specifically for posting on Flickr. We're not too into podcasts or audiobooks because we're more visual learners, but the kids have created their own podcasts for others - both digitally and the "old school" tape recorder kind. :D One daughter is also interested in being a graphic designer and does some website work.

Hubby's a programmer and I'm a web developer, so we're skewed towards technology anyway. But we're also hippies and live in the country, going back to the land, so for all the tech education the kids have, we also make sure they know of the "old ways" of doing things. Actually, through all that, I didn't mention my middle daughter because she was born 200 years too late. :D She writing a novel by hand and sewing historical costumes. By hand.

You can check out my homeschooling archives here - atypicalife.net/blog/category/homeschooling/ although I don't really talk too much about the process anymore as we tend to *live* it and we're not curriculum-focused. We just follow our interests as deeply as possible, usually through a mix of as many library books as we can carry, DVDs, tv shows, and extensive Internet look-ups.

WOW! Thank you - everyone - for sharing! These projects go beyond creative. It's truly high level thinking at its best. Do send me photos! I'd love to post them.

amy dot bowllan at reedbusiness dot com