I discovered Vyew only a few days ago, but already I have put it to use and have big plans for the future.
This week a fellow homeschooling mom posted that she had a frustrating day trying to teach a particular math concept to her two elementary aged children. I had a neat trick to make the concept click, but it was hard to really share it using text in a comment box to her blog. So, I invited her to my Vwey room and not only was the trick a big hit with the kids, so was Vyew! Tomorrow, we are going to meet again and the kids on her end and the kids on my end are going to play some Vyew based math games I made.
The main reason I stumbled upon Vyew was because I was trying to find some way that the kids that I teach in our local homeschool co-op and I could get together on Tuesdays through Fridays. You see I teach free co-op classes such as chemistry, government, writing, biology, and physics. On Mondays all the kids come to my house where we do group activities, labs, have discussions, lectures, and have some social time. Trying to pack 5 days worth of curriculum into our one day together makes for a busy day. But more days per week would be too time consuming and expensive because we all live rural. Some families have to drive 120 miles round trip to get here on Monday. Eveyone has computers and the internet though. I figured that there had to be some effective way that we could put technology to work and meet together online 4 days of the week. Vyew is an exciting discovery for us!
We start our next co-op (plant biology) in just a few more weeks. I am looking forward to what we will be able to do. With Vyew we can move the following events from Mondays to other days of the week - lectures (I already had been using PowerPoint anyway), discussions, many of the group cololaborative projects, and they can have extra opportunities for social events. Now, Monday labs and hands-on activities can be done at a leisurely pace. Whew, what a blessing!
I have been telling other homeschoolers about Vyew’s potential for their co-ops and how we all can help each other all across the nation when we need the help. This week I helped a family living two time zones away from me. Next month, I might need help with how to solve a particular problem in my son’s Trigonometry text. Now I feel like I can send a flare for help up and have a place where ‘knower’ and ‘knowee’ can communicate easily. So nice to be able to see the steps happening, be able to stop and ask questions at any point, and have such an easy means to draw those hard to show math symbols such as aquare roots, summation, top-over-bottom fractions, etc. The whiteboard is such a big help with that. Much better than the text tools in an e-mail. LOL
Thanks again for making Vyew available and putting such thought into the design. We sure do appreciate it.
Tammy Moore
