Review: MySchoolYear.com

For the last few weeks, I have been using My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) from MySchoolYear.com to track, organise and record our boys education.

Keeping track of your child’s schoolwork, hours and lessons is a must for homeschoolers. Finding an easy way to do this can be quite difficult, but with an annual online membership to MySchoolYear.com your life could be changed dramatically. This homeschool record keeping program allows you to create a record for your homeschool in just a few minutes. With the ability to use this program on your tablet or smart phone as well as your laptop, this planner is easily accessible, even when you are out and about.

With this program you can:

• create lesson plans with lesson plan generators
• generate report cards and transcripts
• automated grading, attendance tracking and scheduling
• mark lessons that have been completed
• reschedule or modify lessons
• search and sort classes and lessons
• track awards, reading logs, volunteer work, sports and more

How did I go?

Once logging in, you need to set up your account. This was quick and easy to do. First, adding each child’s information and then moving onto their lessons and scheduled events.

Some of the really good features that I loved were in the ‘Tools’ tab (On the dropdown menu when you click on My Homeschool). Here you can copy classes and reading lists which was great having two kids. I just had to enter what I needed for one child and then copy it to the other child if he was also going to do the same thing. Another thing in this tab that I liked was the option to reschedule lessons. So when someone gets sick or unexpected things pop up and you run out of time to complete your lessons for that day, you can easily reschedule those lessons onto another day.

In the Homeroom, you are able to visually track the progress of your students. One glance and you can see each child’s classes, attendance records and their reading log. Having the Jump To buttons on this Homeroom page is a great asset. You can quickly change to the student you want and then jump to their classes, attendance, extra curricular activities and reading lists, among other things.

Our boys are avid readers and it is hard keeping up with knowing what books they have read. In the picture below, I have just started adding the upcoming books that they are looking forward to reading. It will be interesting to see how many books they actually read during the next month and even the next 12 months.

The Teacher’s Aid area is great for reminding you about the information you have missed. This screenshot was taken before adding classes to my kids profiles, so you can see I have lots of reminders of things that I am missing, or haven’t finished adding yet, for both of our boys. I love how it tells you the next steps that you need to take to make sure all your records are complete, allowing me to stay on top of things. I also have received email reminders for this as well.

At the top of the picture above, is an example of what you see when you click a ‘Need Help?’ button. The information isn’t very detailed. It would have been nice to see a short video here instead.

Overall, I liked the simple, uncluttered design and layout of the website. One thing I like to do is see the whole week’s activities of both of our boys, but I couldn’t find anywhere to do this. The idea behind this program is really good, though at the moment it just wasn’t a very good fit for us. There were areas that I really loved and others that I didn’t use much at all. 

I would recommend you try it out first with the 30 day trial membership to make sure this product suits you before purchasing.  The pricing for MySchoolYear is also quite reasonable with monthly rates only $5, or an annual membership for only $40! Both plans offer all features, however the annual membership also comes with a Price Lock Guarantee, meaning your annual rate will never increase as long as there is no lapse in your membership.

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