Hschooler.net Updates

The most popular feature in Hschooler is the “Groups” feature. There are over a hundred groups within Hschooler today, almost all of them created by Hschooler members and most of them broad, open discussion topics that anyone can join. The four most popular groups are “Christian Music Lovers,” “People who love animals,” “ART for those Who LOVE it!,” and “Sports.” This use of the Groups feature is a great way for members to connect with others, share their passions, and make new friends.

But an even more powerful use of the Groups feature is to support, well… groups.

For any small group - such as a sports team, a Boy Scout patrol, a Bible study, or a book club - a Group within Hschooler can do a great job of organizing and connecting the group members. In addition to Group Discussions (that can be separated into multiple different topics), Groups can have a Group Calendar, Group Prayer Requests, Group Files, and Group Photo Albums (for those members authorized by parents to share/view photos). Groups can also be “closed” - meaning that only members approved by the group owner can join, see the group’s content, and contribute.

Each Hschooler member can create one group for free. Additional groups can be created for about $1 each.

Larger organizations aren’t as well served by having a single Group. A Boy Scout troop, a Homeschool Co-op, or a Church is really a collection of overlapping groups. Any individual member of the organization may participate in different ways in different groups of other members - maybe as a Sunday School Teacher, a Deacon, and a member of the Choir, for example. For these larger organizations, we have created an Organization function. An Organization is effectively a private social network within Hschooler. Membership of the Organization is centrally controlled by the “real world” organization’s administration team. No other members of Hschooler can even see that the Organization exists, much less attempt to join without an invitation. An Organization, in a way, is a collection of Groups (with all of the functionality described above) that are totally private to the Organization’s membership. An Organization also has its own Dashboard that members see when they sign in, showing discussions, calendar events, prayer requests, etc. that are relevant to them given their participation in different Groups.

An Organization can have an unlimited number of Groups. Creating an Organization within Hschooler costs between $150 and $250 per year depending on the number of members. Contact us (info@hschooler.net) to find out more.

Whether or not you’re currently a member of Hschooler, hopefully this article has helped you understand how you can use the service to help your group or organization to be better connected. And if you are a member, hopefully it has encouraged you to make better use of the tools already at your fingertips.

Today, at the Midwest Parent Educators conference, I’m leading a workshop titled “The Socially Connected Homeschooler: Get the Most out of Hschooler.net.” The description provided in the conference program says:

As homeschoolers, we quickly learned to network, finding
likeminded families to share the journey, co-ops to share each
educator’s strengths, and field trip opportunities. As
homeschoolers, we’ve also learned to use the Internet to
support our studies, reserve materials at the library, and
research. Online social networks seem like a perfect fit. But, as
Christian parents, we are protective of our families and we’ve
heard enough horror stories to steer clear. Thankfully, MPE has
arranged full family access for members to Hschooler.net, an
alternative focused on the Biblical mandate for parents to
protect their families. In this workshop, Russ McGuire, the
founder of Hschooler.net, will demonstrate many of the key
features so that you can know how to use it to protect your
family while providing social opportunities, to participate in MPE
discussion groups, and to establish and manage groups,
calendars, and prayer lists for your cluster group or co-op.

Most of the material I’ll share is available in the Tutorials at Hschooler.net which can be accessed here: http://hschooler.net/tutorials/tutorial.php.

Specifically, here are the sections I’ll be covering:

• First Login to Organization
• Lost Userid
• A Brief Intro to Hschooler
• Making Friends
• Groups
• Managing Your Family

Additionally, the handouts for the session include notes on how to use the most common features of Hschooler:Hschooler.net Handout

Today at lunchtime, I’m leading a workshop on “The Seven Disciplines of Biblical Business Success.” The target audience is a collection of young entrepreneurs who have signed up for tables at the MPE Conference to promote their businesses, although I imagine other MPE members will also be listening in.

I know that I have prepared more content than I can possibly cover in an hour. There will be handouts available that cover all 7 (really 14, since they come in pairs) disciplines, but I fear that there may not even be enough handouts for the number of folks that might show up. (The handouts are a collection of articles that I wrote for Home School Enrichment magazine. They have graciously given permission for me to provide them here for this purpose.)Therefore, I’ve uploaded here both the presentation I’m using today and the handout.

I’ve also created a group in Hschooler called “MPE Young Entrepreneurs” to continue the discussion beyond the conference. Feel free to join us there. Log in to Hschooler and then click on this link: http://hschooler.net/pg/groups/92569/mpe-young-entrepreneurs/.

May this be a blessing to you and your family.

Seven Disciplines Workshop Presentation

HSE: Raising Entrepreneurs

We have just launched a number of improvements to the Groups function within Hschooler.net. Groups is the most popular feature of Hschooler and we hope these improvements are helpful to you, but if not, or if you have any comments about Groups or any part of Hschooler.net, feel free to drop me a note at russ.mcguire@gmail.com.

Here’s a brief summary of our improvements:

• We’ve added a Groups menu to the top menu bar. It’s denoted by an icon of a group of three silhouettes (just to the left of the messaging envelope).
• If you have any outstanding invitations to join a group or requests for someone to join your closed group, these will be indicated by a number in brackets by the groups icon (e.g. [2]).
• The groups menu provides a short cut to the latest discussions, a list of all groups, and links to each of the 10 groups that you belong to that you’ve posted the most in.
• The list of recent discussions and the list of groups are now in sortable tables, so you can sort by a variety of different factors (oldest, newest, most members, most posts, latest post, etc.).
• The list of recent discussions now includes ALL discussions, whether you have access to them or not. You can’t see the actual comments unless you are a member (or your child is a member), but you can at least see the discussion topic, so you can decide whether or not its a group you want to join.
• A general discussion topic will be created for each group, so “off topic” discussions have a home. This topic will automatically be created whenever the first group member visits that group’s profile page. (And that group member will have the honor of being identified as the owner of the topic - so QUICK - visit all your group profiles so you’re the owner of all the general topics. )
• The Group Profile has been improved to be cleaner and better organized. The buttons to join and tell a friend about the group are easier to find, and the general discussion topic is featured on the profile page to make it easy to quickly add a comment to the discussion.
• Tell a Friend is a new feature which makes it easy to tell your friends about a group they might not know about. You can write them a personal note about why you think the group is interesting.
• The Group Profile page also shows all the group members, with a link to all the members in a sortable table, so you can find the newest, oldest, or most active members.
• We’ve also used the sortable table capability for listing all the discussion topics in a group and for listing all the comments in a given topic.

I’m sure there are some other improvements that I’ve missed in this list, but I’m sure you get the idea - we’ve done a lot to make Groups work better. We hope it helps you and would love to hear your feedback.

Blessings!

Russ McGuire
Hschooler.net founder

There’s more troubling news out of the Facebook camp this week. A lot of people are frustrated by changes to the user interface. On that point, it’s easy to side with Facebook. We are constantly working to improve Hschooler.net, and sometimes that involves change to how people use the service. I’m guessing that, over time, most Facebook users will come to appreciate the improvements that the company has made.

The scary issues, however, deal with privacy. Dave Winner has written a piece called “Facebook is scaring me,” which reports that Facebook is tracking and sharing what sites you visit, even if you don’t authorize them to do so. His recommendation is to make sure you log out of Facebook so your movements around the Internet won’t be tracked. However, Nik Cubrilovic responds by saying logging out isn’t enough. He provides a lot of technical detail (and some language I don’t appreciate) in his post “Logging out of Facebook isn’t enough.” He reports that Facebook continues to track what is done on a computer and associate those activities to a Facebook user, even after they’ve logged out of Facebook. He makes the point that this is scary especially if you log into Facebook from a public computer (e.g. at a library, hotel, or airport).

Needless to say, at Hschooler.net, we take privacy very seriously. We recognize that, even though Facebook and other secular sites present a lot of value, they also are operating in a post-privacy world* that scares us, especially as Christian parents trying to raise our kids in a safe environment. That’s why we’ve created Hschooler.net. I know that we will make mistakes. We’ll introduce “improvements” that you don’t appreciate. When we do that, please let us know. Lord willing, we hope to never make a mistake that violates your privacy. If you ever believe that we have, please contact me directly at russ.mcguire@gmail.com. We will address it immediately.

* Last year, Helen A. S. Popkin wrote a good summary of the situation at msnbc.com. She included a couple of quotes to give a sense of this post-privacy world:

Sun CEO Scott McNealy from 1999: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from 2010: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.”

This morning we issued a press release announcing a partnership with Midwest Parent Educators.

What we’ve done is create a private social network for MPE’s members inside of Hschooler.net. When their members log in to Hschooler, they see a dashboard that is styled to match MPE’s website. They are automatically added to a couple of MPE Groups, and on their MPE dashboard, they see the most recent activity in these Groups, upcoming calendar events for these Groups, and prayer requests for these Groups. They also see a newsfeed that is relevant to MPE members. The two MPE Groups are private, meaning that only MPE members can see them. The organization can create additional Groups that are private to MPE members and can set them up so that all MPE members can post to them, or only MPE staff. The MPE staff also has a set of tools for managing the organization, including managing the membership, managing groups, managing the dashboard, and seeing usage reports to know what’s working and what’s not.

What does this mean for you?

Well, if you’re an Hschooler.net member, you’ll likely start seeing a bunch of new members on Hschooler. Please give them a warm welcome. MPE members not only have access to the organization’s private social network space and groups, but also to the rest of Hschooler. MPE has over a thousand member families, all of whom will be receiving an e-mail with their login information. For any that are already Hschooler.net members, they simply associate their existing Hschooler account with the account MPE created for them and they’re good to go.

If you are part of the leadership of an organization and you think this is exactly what your membership needs, drop me a note at russ.mcguire@gmail.com. We believe that there’s tremendous value in social networking - enabling your members to stay connected with each other all the time, making it easy for members to find information, and keeping your organization relevant and top of mind for your members throughout the year. Working with Hschooler.net allows you to leverage the rich set of features we’ve created for our members without any software development on your part, lets your members join in the great conversations already happening on Hschooler, and avoids the concerns with privacy and content that you would have with pointing your members to one of the secular social networks.

See you soon on Hschooler!

We’ve just completed some significant development for Hschooler. Much of the effort has been focused on some exciting new capabilities that we aren’t yet ready to announce, but that we expect will make Hschooler.net an attractive destination for many new members. Stay tuned!

However, one really exciting capability that is now apparent is that you can have more than one dashboard!

In fact, we’ve created three new dashboards for everyone: Bible Dashboard, Groups Dashboard, and Family Dashboard. You can get to these by putting your mouse over the “Home” icon in the menubar, and selecting each dashboard from the list that appears. You can also add your own dashboards (you can have up to 10) by selecting “Add Dashboard”.

An important benefit of having multiple dashboards is that you can now “skinny down” your main dashboard so that it loads faster. By spreading your favorite widgets around different dashboards, you can remove widgets from your main dashboard.

To learn more about multiple dashboards, check out the new tutorial here.

Enjoy!

Groups and Messaging are the two most popular features in Hschooler.net.

We’re in the midst of some significant new developments, but we thought we’d go ahead and roll out a few of the improvements that will be included in that next major release. These minor tweaks provide improved usability that you can start enjoying right now.

Specifically:

• When sending a message, the pull down list of your friends now shows their icon as well as their name. That way, if you have two (or more) friends with the same name, you can pick the right one.
• When looking at a list of groups, those that you’re already a member of will say “Current Member” to remind you that you’re already in.
• When looking at a list of group topics, you can now choose “oldest” to see the list of comments in that topic from oldest to newest (this is how it’s always worked), or “newest” to see the list of comments from newest to oldest (this is a new capability).
• When you’re reading discussion comments, we’ve also added the navigation (previous, next) to the bottom of the list as well at the top so you don’t have to scroll back up just to go to the next page.

We hope these minor changes will enhance your Hschooler.net experience. Please let us know if you have any problems or ideas for making it even better!

We have just issued a press release about our new Chat and Games features. You can read it here.

We continue to hope and pray that Hschooler.net can be a blessing to a growing number of Christian families as they prepare their children to positively interact with an increasingly connected society. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns about Hschooler.net.

We are pleased to announce the availability of several highly requested new features for Hschooler.net.

The most highly requested feature in Hschooler.net has been Chat. Chat is now available, although it has to be enabled by parents through a Family account. All Hschooler.net members should now see a bar running across the bottom of their screen. This is the Chat bar. It can be moved out of the way by clicking on the arrows on the left end of the bar. On the right end of the bar is an indicator of how many of your friends are online. Clicking on that will show your online friends. Once the parents in your Family account turn on Chat for you, you will be able to see friends that you are allowed to chat with, and then click on their names to open a chat session with them. Parents can watch a tutorial for how to manage Chat for their family members here. Everyone can watch a tutorial on how to use Chat here. We hope you enjoy Chatting with your friends on Hschooler. We’d love to hear your feedback.

The second highly requested feature we’ve added is educational games. We’ve worked with Arcademic Skill Builders to make it easy to launch educational games from within Hschooler.net. Since all the parents that we talk to want to have control over whether their kids are playing games (even educational ones), this feature is another one that must be enabled by parents before it is available to members. Once enabled, Games is available from the Tools menu and a Featured Game widget can be added to your Dashboard. You can watch a tutorial on how to use the Games feature here.

We’ve also created new widgets that you can add to your Dashboard that provide Weather updates (from AccuWeather.com) and Sports Scores (from ESPN.com). The Sports Scores widget must first be enabled by parents. If you need help adding widgets to your dashboard, you can watch a tutorial here.

As always, we welcome your feedback on these new features or any aspect of the Hschooler.net service. You can send us feedback through the site, or by emailing russ.mcguire@gmail.com.