Over the past few weeks we’ve added a couple of fun features that seem to be attracting attention.

We’ve added the ability for Hschooler members to create simple, one question polls. When their friends answer the poll, the results are displayed as a pie chart. Each member can create two polls for free and can take as many as they like. To create more than two polls costs 50 Tuits per poll.

Some of the polls that members have created so far include:

• Favorite sport overall
• Favorite type of food
• Favorite NFL team
• Denomination

We’ve also made it possible for Hschooler members to create more sophisticated “fun quizzes”. These quizzes ask the participant a series of questions about themselves, and based on the answers, the quiz makes an association. You’ll see what I mean by the examples below. Each member can create one fun quiz for free and additional ones cost 100 Tuits each.

Some of the fun quizzes created so far:

• What Star Wars Planet Are You Most Like
• What Super Hero Are You Most Like?
• What animal are you?
• Which of Jesus’ apostles are you most like?

As with all features within Hschooler.net, parents with family accounts can turn this capability off for any of their family members. By default, new polls and quizzes are only visible to the friends of the member (or less if the creator chooses), and parents can also change this to allow broader or less broad visibility.

Log in to Hschooler and visit the Quiz Center (under the Tools menu) to try it out now!

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth at the MPE Conference this weekend.

It was great to meet those of you who are already Hschooler members and to hear how much you love the service. It was also great to introduce hundreds of families to Hschooler and to hear their enthusiasm for how we are addressing the challenges of safely raising families in a world that is increasingly reliant on online social networks.

I hope and pray the service we are creating can be a blessing to many!

Apparently, the new interest in Hschooler.net following the MPE conference was overloading our server. We’ve just completed upgrading the hosting, increasing capacity by 50%. We’ll keep an eye on it to see if this is enough. We apologize for any problems you may have encountered today because of this capacity problem.

Friday and Saturday, April 16-17, we will be at the Midwest Parent Educators Homeschool Conference at the KCI Expo Center in Kansas City, Missouri.

If you’re in the area, come visit us in Booth #1108!

See you there!

If you look at the list of suggestions submitted by Hschooler.net members, you’ll quickly see that the most requested feature is Chat or Instant Messaging. It has been suggested by four different members.

We want you to know that we aren’t ignoring these requests.

However, there are a couple of major issues that we need to deal with before implementing Chat or IM on Hschooler.net.

The first is fairly tactical. The web, by it’s nature, is a static, page-based medium. You load a web page and it sits there waiting for you to do something. Since the web was introduced back in the early 1990s, many advances have enabled the web to become more dynamic. Flash and Javascript are probably the two most important technologies in enabling a web page to be interactive without being reloaded or without going to a different page. However, it’s tricky to implement these technologies, especially in a way that doesn’t either overload the web browser or overload the web server.

Thankfully, others have developed Chat/IM plugins for the platform we use for Hschooler.net. However, these are designed to work with newer versions of the platform than we’re currently running with Hschooler.net. I expect we’ll upgrade the platform this summer, which will allow us to try out different Chat/IM plugins and hopefully implement one that meets our needs.

The second issue is more strategic. What sets Hschooler.net apart from other online social networks is our focus on creating a safe environment that is honoring to God and is family-centered, recognizing the God-given authority of parents. As with other tools in Hschooler.net, it’s important to us to give parents the ability to set the boundaries for their family members. Some family members may not yet be ready for IM/Chat, while others clearly are and should be given significant freedom.

But with Chat and Instant Messaging, there’s more than just the trustworthiness of the family member involved. We’ve all heard horror stories of Internet chat and instant messaging problems that threaten the safety of our families. None of us at Hschooler.net want to have our service become part of another horror story. We believe that giving parents the option of complete visibility into the conversations their family members are having through Hschooler.net is an important part of maintaining our mission and our differentiation.

That means that, once we find an existing package that provides the functionality that we think our users want, we will still need to invest significant development time into making our Chat/IM implementation Hschooler-ready.

In the meantime, we appreciate your patience! Please continue to send us your feedback, suggestions, and ideas.

We’ve added a new feature to Hschooler.net - the ability to create photo albums and upload photos to share with your friends!

While this is an exciting new feature that we expect to be very popular, we also realize that photos are a sensitive type of content. Parents are rightfully concerned about both whether their kids are uploading unsafe pictures (e.g. pictures that expose too much personal information or pictures that are embarrassing to the kids or their friends) and whether their kids are viewing pictures with inappropriate content. Given that our focus at Hschooler is creating a fun and safe environment that recognizes the God-given authority of parents, before introducing Photos, we knew we had to build in safeguards for this feature.

To address the first concern (kids uploading pictures), Photos is a feature that must be enabled by parents. Until it is enabled, a user can’t upload any photos. That means that the Photos feature is only available to members that have upgraded to a Family account. We believe that’s the right decision for creating a safe environment. By the way, as with all tools in Hschooler, parents can set boundaries for how broadly their family members can share Photos. A parent might decide that a younger child should only share photos with family members until she can demonstrate that she’s using good discretion.

To address the second concern (what kids can see), parents can also set boundaries for whose photos each family member can see. For example, a parent might set the boundary so that a student can see photos from “trusted friends” but not “all friends”. (By the way, if you ever see any inappropriate content in Hschooler, please click the “Report this” link in the top left corner of most windows in Hschooler.net.)

Every member that has Photos enabled gets 10MB of free storage for photos. We encourage members to set their digital camera to take lower resolution photos, or use a photo editing tool (like Photoshop or Paint.net) to reduce the resolution so that they can store dozens of photos in that 10MB. Once the first 10MB are filled with photos, additional storage can be purchased with Tuits - the virtual currency within Hschooler.net.

Check out the video tutorial for Enabling and Managing Photos and the video tutorial for using Photos.

We never got around to announcing the launch of the To Do Tasks tool and widget, although it’s been out for a couple of months.

This tool allows you to create an assignment for yourself and/or others. You can then provide updates on it and change the status. A dashboard widget can show tasks assigned to you, tasks assigned by you, or tasks assigned to everyone in your family. The color of the tasks in the widget show the status and warn you when a task is almost due. You can also “check off” tasks as completed in the widget.

One task can be assigned to multiple people if it’s a team assignment. A task can also have sub-tasks which is especially useful for team projects (e.g. creating a newsletter, where different team members are responsible for different sub-tasks for completing the entire project).

A task can also be set up as recurring, for example for chores that need to be repeated every day (make your bed) or maybe once a week (collect trash around the house).

You can check out a tutorial for this feature here.

Let us know what you think!

If you’re an Hschooler.net member, you’ve probably noticed that we redesigned our website, and especially the main home page. We wanted to make it easier for folks to understand what’s special about Hschooler.net, so we include two videos (make sure you click on the tabs in the top left to see both) - one from a parent’s perspective and the other from a kid’s perspective.

Let us know what you think!

Over the next couple of weeks we will be implementing a website redesign.

Hopefully you’ll like the changes!

Let us know if you see any problems.

An inbox widget is now available for your dashboard within Hschooler.net. This widget lets you see the 10 most recent messages you’ve received without having to go into the Messaging tool (usually accessed by clicking the envelope in the tool bar). From the widget you can click on a message to go straight into it, or you can click to compose a new message to someone.

To start using the Inbox widget, you’ll first need to approve it in your Manage Access tool (either click your name in the “My Family” widget, or click your name in the Manage Family tool that comes up when you select “Family” from the Tools menu).

You’ll then need to Edit your Dashboard (click “Edit page” in the top right corner) and drag the widget from the Widget Gallery on the right into one of the Widget columns to the left.

Let me know what you think!