We’ve added the capability to list family members who aren’t yet (and may never be) members of Hschooler.net.

Consider the scenario where a homeschooling family has several kids. A couple of the kids (let’s call them Matthew and Mark) are very interested in connecting with their friends through a social network, so Hschooler.net is the natural choice. Abe, the dad in the family registers as a member of Hschooler.net and upgrades to a family account. His wife Sara also registers as member of Hschooler.net and Abe adds Sara as a Parent of the Raham family.

Abe and Sara spend some time checking out Hschooler.net and decide it’s a healthy, safe, and edifying environment for their kids to connect with their friends. So, they sit down with Matthew and walk him through registering for his own user account in Hschooler.net. Sara then logs into Hschooler.net, adds Matthew to the Raham family as a student, and sets his access to the tools she thinks he’s ready for and sets his level of visibility for each.

After a few days, Matthew is really enjoying Hschooler.net and Mark is asking of his parents that he have his own Hschooler.net account. Abe sits down with Mark and walks him through registering for his own user account. Abe then adds Mark to the Raham family and sets up his access. While he’s in there, he increases Matthew’s access to a few more tools, recognizing that Matthew has demonstrated maturity in his Hschooler.net interactions.

However, Abe and Sara agree that their two younger children, Luke and John (naturally) are not yet ready for Hschooler.net. In fact, these two show no interest yet in such things. However, the Raham parents want their Hschooler.net family listing to be complete, so they add Luke and John as “non-member” members of their family through the same Family tool they used to add Matthew and Mark.

I hope you find this new capability useful.

We’ve added a new feature to Hschooler.net.

Parents now have three options for managing how their students use the Messaging tool within the community.

In general, Messaging allows a member to send and receive e-mail-like messages from their Friends within Hschooler.net. There is no linkage to public e-mail (such as the Internet), so members can’t send messages to external addresses, nor can they receive messages from outside Hschooler.net.

The first level of control is that parents can choose to Disable Messaging for any member of their family. When this happens, the member will not see the messaging tools within Hschooler.net, will not be able to send messages, and will not be able to receive messages.

The second level of control is that parents can limit to whom members of their family can send messages. For example, one student may only be able to send messages to family members, another may be able to send messages to “trusted” friends, while a third my be set so that she can send messages to any of her friends within Hschooler.net.

The third level of management is that parents can choose to monitor messages sent and received by a student. If monitoring is turned on, each time a message is sent by the student, or sent to the student, the parents are notified of the new message, including who it is from and to, the subject, and the body of the message. Most parents will have their notification settings in the default setting, so these notifications will be received via (Internet) e-mail. (Any member can change his settings to receive notifications only via the Hschooler.net site.) Parents will also have full access to read any message in the monitored student’s Inbox or Sent Items folder. This access is through the normal Messaging tool, with two additional mailboxes being available for each monitored student.

We hope that this new feature will allow parents to feel more confident in allowing their students to participate in the social aspects of Hschooler.net.