[Podcast #314] Two Honest Thoughts About Tech in Homeschool

Brave Writer Podcast

Is tech quietly ruining your homeschool?

In this Brave Writer podcast episode, we explore what happens when we trade the shared adventure of learning at home for one-child-one-screen schooling.

We look at:

  • why so many of us feel pressured to meet standards,
  • how online platforms promise to “save” us,
  • and what our kids might be losing when learning is reduced to logins, slides, and quizzes.

We also imagine a different path: learning as a lifestyle, full of real conversations, messy projects, and magic moments that don’t fit into a metric.

Tune in, then join us in reclaiming the joy of being learners together at home.

Show Notes

If you’ve homeschooled for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed a shift. Where home education once meant cozy mornings with books, baking, and science experiments at the kitchen table, more and more families are turning to sleek online platforms that promise to handle everything for us. Kids log in, work through modules, and we receive reassuring dashboards of data.  

We understand the appeal. Many of us want the fruit of homeschooling—delight-led learning, flexible schedules, freedom from school dysfunction—without the constant pressure of planning, teaching, and troubleshooting. When life is already full, “homeschool in a box” can feel like mercy.  

Tech as a Tempting Shortcut  

Online programs offer exactly what tired parents crave: independent work, built-in accountability, and the sense that someone else has thought of all the subjects and standards our kids “should” be covering. We can work, run a household, or care for younger children while a platform delivers lessons on geology, grammar, and everything in between.  

The trouble isn’t the occasional online class. Used as a “turbo boost” for a specific subject or season, tech can be a gift. The problem comes when those platforms take over the *whole* day. Our kids begin to associate learning with screens, quizzes, and progress bars instead of with real people, real conversations, and the real world. We risk becoming homeschool managers rather than home educators—referees enforcing someone else’s system instead of partners in our children’s curiosity.  

Learning as a Lifestyle, Not a Metric  

Homeschooling gets complicated when we treat it as a DIY version of school: same standards, same benchmarks, just at the kitchen table. We worry about grade-level expectations and test scores, then wonder why our kids resist or shut down. Underneath their squirming and “I hate this” complaints is often a simple fear: “If I really try and I’m not good at it, I’ll disappoint you.”  

What if we laid down the yardstick for a while?  

When we stop obsessing over how our children compare to an invisible average, we’re free to notice something far more important: Are they meaningfully engaged? Do they light up over certain topics? Do they feel safe enough to try, fail, and try again? Real learning connotes use; it happens when kids are doing something that matters to them—baking, filming, coding, building forts, writing stories for a sibling—not just filling in boxes on a screen.  

Making Room for Real-Life Learning  

This is the daring idea at the heart of home education: an ordinary parent is good enough to create a rich learning life. Not a Pinterest-perfect life, not a constantly magical one—but a life where there’s time to explore, daydream, tinker, and talk.  

That might look like:  

  • A simple daily routine with pockets of unstructured time.  
  • Short bursts of skill work (a math page, a phonics lesson, a bit of copywork).  
  • Immediate, meaningful application: Yahtzee after math, read-alouds after phonics, freewriting once handwriting is in place.  
  • Shared adventures—nature walks, museum trips, documentaries, kitchen experiments—that no algorithm could have predicted.  

When we toggle gently between skills and application, without turning every experience into a graded performance, we string together what we like to call “pearls”: those unexpected moments when something clicks, a project takes off, or a child does something new simply because they care.  

We aren’t against tech, hybrid schools, or co-ops. We’re for using the hours we *do* have with our kids to offer something different from metric-driven education: a taste of learning as joyful, relational, and deeply human. When our children discover that they are learners—not just students—we’ve given them a gift no platform can replicate.

Resources

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Produced by NOVA

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Tech Guidelines in Your Home

Brave Writer

It is important to have good guidelines for tech in your home. I know you will have frank and kind talks with your kids. But if your life is being reduced to endless vigilance and fear of dopamine hits and scary internet searches, that’s harming your relationship with your kids. It shouldn’t be how you spend your daily parenting energy. It’s also not your fault.

People (who don’t spend 24 hours a day with their children like homeschoolers do) have proposed lots of solutions. In speaking with some adult children who were homeschooled, many are going analog with flip phones and DVDs and a desktop computer out in the living room rather than iPads and laptops all over the house.

But regulation doesn’t mean that your kids are immune to the impact of tech all around them. And it doesn’t mean you won’t end up in emotional battles around the desire to use the most exciting technology ever created in the history of the world.

When everything you do feels countercultural (homeschooling, analog tech, add your other countercultural practices), you become exhausted fighting the cultural flow.

And I’m sorry that we are living in a time where parents feel called on to be at odds with their children and the culture all day every day.

That’s why you’re tired! That’s why you give up sometimes.

There are no easy solutions.

Let’s keep brainstorming how to support and help each other. That’s what I try to do in my books—I want to give you that support. You’re not crazy and you’re not weak for finding this moment in parenting really challenging.

Two Instagram accounts to follow:

  1. @devorahheitnerphd
  2. @thegamereducator

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
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Brave Learning: The Trick to Writing Well

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Recently on Brave Learning…

The Trick to Writing Well

A missive for your teens to read: Please share it with them!

There’s a reason that teachers, employers, or parents ask to see something you’ve written. It’s a way to see what you know!

Writing is your chance to compose a response, explain your thinking, or demonstrate your understanding. Unless you put those thoughts and ideas somewhere for others to read, they stay in your head, out of sight.

Beyond the academic context, plenty of us write, even when it’s not for a grade! Do you ever wonder why we bother? Why go through the trouble of writing down our thoughts? Why not just think them? Or have a big juicy conversation with someone?

It turns out, writing does something for us that thinking and talking alone can’t accomplish. It actually helps us think differently and learn something about ourselves and the world around us, too.

Here’s how the writing process looked for me as I sat down to write this very post! You might experience some similar sensations when you commit words to the page…

[Keep reading]

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)! 

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[Podcast #313] Perspective in Learning

Brave Writer Podcast

What if the key to helping your kids love learning is simply seeing the world through their eyes?

In this Brave Writer podcast episode, we explore perspective as the secret sauce of education and connection. We begin with Steven’s unforgettable appreciation letter to UPS (and the jaw-dropping chocolate response!) then move on to practical ways to help kids imagine other points of view:

  • through microscopes and magnifying glasses,
  • collaborative storytelling,
  • fan fiction,
  • and rich books that stretch their empathy.

We also talk about “wasted” time, sandbox learning, and why pleasure matters more than performance.

Tune in and choose one new perspective shift to try with your kids this week.

Show Notes

Perspective is one of the most powerful tools we have as parents and educators, and it’s astonishing how often we forget to use it. We want our kids to care about math facts, handwriting, history timelines, and essay structure, but they don’t yet share our vantage point. From where they sit, those priorities can feel arbitrary, tedious, or even hostile. When we slow down enough to see through their eyes, everything about learning begins to change.

Perspective Begins with Appreciation

One of our favorite stories about perspective started with a simple thank-you note. Steven wrote an appreciation letter to UPS after a particularly skillful delivery experience. That handwritten note climbed the corporate ladder until it reached an executive response team member who tracked the family down to send a tower of gourmet chocolates specially tailored to his love of marshmallows (see below pic!). Buried in her original email was the subject line “customer complaint response” because there wasn’t even a category for appreciation.

Brave Writer Podcast

That tiny glimpse into the UPS system reminded us how rare genuine gratitude is. Most structures are built to handle complaints, not thanks. When our kids learn to imagine the human being behind the uniform, inbox, or name tag, they begin to see the world differently. The same is true in our homeschool. When we respond to their writing with specific, heartfelt praise—“This image is going to stay with me”—we energize them. That positive feedback doesn’t just feel good; it makes them more willing to take risks and more open to gentle critique later.

Changing the Lens—Literally and Figuratively

Perspective-taking often begins with the body. When we hand a child a magnifying glass or jeweler’s loupe, they suddenly notice details they never knew were there: sparkles in a rock, tiny veins in a leaf, the texture of paint on a canvas. A microscope, telescope, or pair of binoculars does the same thing on a different scale. Change the tool, and you change what’s visible.

We can do this with our own bodies, too. Lie on the floor and look at the room from a four-year-old’s height. Pretend to be the dog: crawl on all fours, drink from a bowl, “eat” from a plate with just your mouth. These playful exercises aren’t about perfect imitation; they’re about discovering how different the world feels from another vantage point.

Literature offers a similar invitation. When we read a book like Watership Down, Dogsbody, or the essays in Disability Visibility, we borrow other lives for a while—rabbit lives, dog lives, disabled lives. Fanfiction lets our kids practice this same skill: writing from a villain’s point of view, retelling a fairy tale from the “bad” character’s side, or exploring side characters who rarely get a voice. Over time, this habit of asking, “How does the world look from where you stand?” becomes a form of intellectual and emotional muscle memory.

Becoming Beginners Again

Perspective also means interrogating our own assumptions about learning. Traditional schooling tends to smush content (what kids should know) and skills (what they must do to access that content) into a single, non-negotiable package. Homeschoolers have the luxury of separating them. We can strew interesting books, tools, and experiences that ignite curiosity before we insist on skills like note-taking, outlining, or formal lab reports.

To really understand our children’s struggles, we have to become beginners ourselves. Try doing copywork with your non-dominant hand, learning a new musical clef, or playing with a base-12 number system. It’s humbling and illuminating to feel your brain work that hard again. Suddenly, the seven-year-old balking at handwriting doesn’t look lazy; they look exactly like you, sweating over a brand-new challenge.

When we make room for sandbox learning, such as failed cookie experiments, homemade parachutes for action figures, and invented number systems, we’re teaching something far more valuable than any single fact set. We’re showing our kids that time spent asking questions and trying things is never wasted. It’s how understanding is built. Mastery will come later; for now, we’re cultivating pleasure, curiosity, and the confidence to keep experimenting.

Perspective, in the end, is a practice. It’s choosing to ask, “What does this feel like from your side?” whether we’re talking to a child, a customer-service rep, or a fictional rabbit. When we approach learning from that angle, our homeschools become less about forcing outcomes and more about walking alongside real human beings as they discover the world.

Resources

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Produced by NOVA

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Enjoy YOUR Holiday

Brave Writer

As you ramp up into holdiay spirit, you might be tempted to put your self esteem in your kids’ hands. If they don’t like the cookies you bake, or seem disappointed in the gift you purchase, or show no interest in a family movie night, you may feel like you’re failing them. Their reaction may bring your spirits down.

Shift the Focus

Concentrate on what makes this holiday season meaningful and twinkly for YOU. Each time you make a plan, make sure you enjoy it and inhabit fully. Let your children’s reactions ride side car. Sometimes they’ll be into it and sometimes they won’t, but it’s not because you didn’t put in enough effort.

Put your energy where it makes your life brighter and merrier. If your kids happen to appreciate the bright and merry with you, that’s a bonus!

By the way: they can also make the holiday bright and merry for themselves. Give them the twinkle lights and the glue gun and the evergreens to decorate as they wish. Turn them loose in the kitchen with your supervision. The more they participate, the more they will feel like the holiday is meaningful to them.

One of my favorite activities as a kid was to wrap each of the stairwell posts in red ribbon. This took a long time at my grandmother‘s house and I have such fond memories of it. Think about ways your children can turn this season into something special that requires their effort rather than just appreciating yours.

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
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