My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) - TOS Review

We've had the opportunity to review My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) from MySchoolYear.com over the last few weeks. We received the Annual Membership to review. 

MySchoolYear.com is an online lesson planner and record keeper. It's site offers many different tools to help keep your homeschool organised, help you know what is overdue, current and upcoming and to search, filter or sort lessons. These include;

Attendance - the automatic attendance will keep track of hours as well.
Lesson Planning - it can be used to create lesson plans and will reschedule lessons if you fall behind. It also lets you share and copy lesson plans for multiple students.
Reports - create transcripts, report cards etc.
Tracker - you can keep track of events, awards, sports, community work and any other extracurricular activities. It also tracks reading lists and there is an option to create materials lists as well. 
Grading - you can enter grades for an automatic grade average a well as keeping track of all graded work.
Teachers aid - automatic reminders for planning and tracking

You start by entering your homeschool information - name, school year, schedule, holidays etc. Then you start adding your students names and their subject, this does take some time so I would advise you find a nice quiet evening and sit down with a hot drink. There are some shortcuts that they have designed to make filling in this section easier (you have to enter lessons and times for each individual subject and student) called Quick Split and Rapid Repeat. Quick Split works by letting you divide a book into sections by day or lesson while Rapid Repeat repeats an assignment automatically adding the next lesson number for you (read chapter 1, read chapter 2 etc)

This is a well designed and well thought out program - they have made it as easy to use as possible and I was impressed with the Teachers Aid - it provided reminders and prompts that helped with the site navigation, it also sensed when I missed entering a piece of information or grade and alerted me so I could stay on top of things. I'm lucky that I don't need to keep records but if you do need to keep records, create reports or keep track of attendance then I can see how this would be really beneficial to you.

 

I really liked having the option to track and include sports and volunteer work for the girls but my favourite section was the Reading Log, it is really simple to use and you can enter as much or as little info as you like - you can assign start or end dates, chapters, genre, assign pages or you can just enter title and completion date. Personally I liked that I could enter the price and keep track of my budgeting (I have a real weakness for book buying so it helped keep me in check).

 

Some nice perks of the program are it's compatibility for use with iphones so it can let you and your students know what you need to do even when you are on the go and it protects all your records so no more worries about crashes or viruses ruining your records.

MySchoolYear.com is available for a monthly fee of $5 or a yearly price of $40.

You can see what my crewmates thought over at the TOS Blog