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APRIL 2004

Show Me the Way To Go HOMER
by Scott Sommerville

"How can you teach your children geometry or biology, if you don't know the subject yourself?" This is one of the seven deadly questions of the homeschool mother-in-law. For years, our family has relied on "We'll get a tutor," or "We'll take a community college course," or "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Now, thanks to modern technology, we can respond, "We can always use Ôdistance learning.'"

HOMER, which stands for the Home Education Resource Network, is an information service offered by a company called IMSATT. For an hourly fee, students can take courses, chat with other students, send electronic mail, or even play games. Designed to run on newer personal computers, you'll need a 2400 baud modem and either a standard Apple Macintosh, or a PC compatible with a color VGA screen, a Microsoft-type mouse, a 40 MB hard drive, and at least 640K of memory, running MS-DOS 3.2 or better.

Upon accessing the CDC computer, a map of the United States appeared, surrounded by bright blue menu buttons. I clicked on an arrow button, and a new screen full of choices appeared, including "Cybis Courses," "Calvert Online," "Test Preparation," "Games," "Bulletin Board Files," and "Software Library."

I selected Cybis, and a new screen full of choices came up: language arts, mathematics, and so on.

Cybis would not let me start right in with lessons—I had to take a placement test first. I worked through the unit on high school geometry. Many of these questions referred to line drawings, which appeared on the screen along with the text. When I finished the pretest, I was assigned lessons on those units that I failed. After working through each module, I was allowed to go back and take the pretest again.

HOMER is intended to be an open forum for any and all accredited educational software, and will soon have the Calvert program. In addition, Harcourt-Brace has signed a contract to bring material on-line. All of these are high-quality secular curricula. Other curricula may soon be available, if publishers are willing to convert their courses into "courseware" for the distance learning market.

A trial kit is available, which allows families to try the system for several hours for a very modest price. Most families can access HOMER with a local telephone call. You can contact IMSATT at (703) 533-7500, or write to 105 West Broad St., Falls Church, VA 22046, for their brochure and/or their trial kit.#

Scott Somerville is a lawyer who defends homeschoolers' rights through the Home School Legal Defense Association, www.hslda.org.

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