Home Schooling Resources

In the past year I came across a program called Aleks (which stands for Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces). Basically it is an online math system where you can enroll your children in a course and let them do all their math work online. The course keeps track of their progress and sends reports to the parent.

I recently signed up for the 30 day trial and thought I would post my thoughts and review here so that others could know about it. The trial begins with you entering the children you want to enroll in the program. The program is for grades 3-12. Once you have enrolled them, each child along with the parent, get a username and password. The parent has the master account and the students have their individual logins.

The students start by taking a diagnostic test to see where they are in the math program. They can answer “I haven’t learned this yet.” if they really don’t know how to answer a problem.
Once the diagnostic test is done (about 25 questions), the student is given “My Pie.” This is a pie chart with the different areas of study in the course that they are taking. They can click on almost any section and choose what they want to work on for the day.

Each set of problems has a dialog box on the right side that encourages them along the way and tells them how many problems they still need to do for the practice set. If the student doesn’t understand the problem at any time, they can click on the “explain” button and get an explanation of the problem.

My children liked the fact that they could move on once they completed three practice problems correctly. Don’t worry, those concepts are reviewed later on. They have choices at the top of their page that take them to “My Pie” where they can see how much they have completed and still need to complete, Review, Dictionary, Calculator (limited use) and Quiz.

As a parent, I liked this program because I got a report about how much time my children spent on the program each day, what they completed, and how they did on their practices, quizzes and tests.  I also liked the fact that I could generate worksheets  for the problems they were working on at any time.

Aleks can be purchased for $19.95 per month per student and there are discounts for multiple students or 6 or 12 month terms. This may seem like a lot, but you get an individualized plan for your child where they can get lots of help and not practice any concept more than what they need to practice. Plus someone else does all the grading for you too!

You can take a 2 minute homeschool tour video here.

Originally posted 2009-09-02 23:23:39. Republished by Blog Post Promoter