As reported at GigaOm:

Around 17 percent of all time spent on the web in August in the U.S. was on social networks, up from 6 percent during the same period a year ago, suggesting that sites like Twitter and Facebook have not only grown their audience size, but augmented user engagement. Meanwhile, advertising on social networks rose to $108 million last month from $49 million in August of 2008, an increase of 119 percent.

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!

According to a recent press release from the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), data published by ACT indicates that over 11,000 homeschooled students graduating in 2009 took the ACT test (just under 1% of the 1.48 million total test takers). The average score for homeschoolers was 22.5 compared to the nationwide average of 21.1.

The HSLDA press release also notes: “It has always been the position of homeschool advocates that the one-on-one instruction provided by dedicated parents is a more effective way to educate children. It’s also much cheaper. The average public school spends $10,000 per child per year whereas the average homeschooler spends $500 per child per year. Homeschooling is also growing rapidly. The National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Federal Department of Education, estimates that homeschooling is growing at around 7% per year.”

About Christian Homeschool Network, LLC: CHN operates Hschooler.net. Hschooler.net is an online social network for Christian homeschooling families. The mission of Hschooler.net is to connect families with the people, resources, and tools to train up young men and women to the Glory of God.

We’ve added “Prayer Requests” to Hschooler.net. We were able to leverage an open source plugin called “kneemail” to greatly accelerate the development (thanks to Greg Marine for his great work on kneemail).

The Prayer Requests plugin provides a bunch of functionality, including:
- A way to add, edit/update, delete, and comment on prayer requests.
- Prayer requests can be classified as Prayer or Praise.
- You can set who can see the prayer request (keep it private just for you, parents, family, trusted friends, friends, everyone).
- It will show up in the “Activity” for those that you’ve allowed to see it when you add it or update it.
- You can also allow others to update the request (e.g. you can set it so others in your family can provide updates)

There’s also a dashboard widget for holding your prayer list:
- When folks give you visibility to prayer requests, they show up at the top of your prayer list as “new requests”.
- You can drag new requests down into your prayer list, or you can drag them down to a list of “hidden requests”.
- Within your prayer list, you can drag requests up or down to reorganize your list. You can also drag requests down to the “hiddent requests” list so you won’t see them anymore.
- You can click on any of the items in your list (or the new requests or hidden requests list - after showing the hidden ones) to see the additional details about the prayer request (or to check for any updates).

To start using the Prayer Requests plugin, you must go into your “Manage Access” for yourself and any of your family members and “enable” it under “Tools” and under “Widgets”. As a reminder, parents can get to “Manage Access” by clicking on a family member’s name in either the “My Family” widget on the dashboard or in the “Manage Family” tool.

I welcome your feedback (russ.mcguire@hschooler.net).