In Alaska we are lucky because the State actually has official correspondence schools for the remote districts, which have spawned homeschool groups that have allotments to give out to families wishing to homeschool their kids. They offer a lot of guidance and structure, as well as funds for curriculum and even some computer stuff. I’m a little bit of an unschooler at heart, so it’s with a bit of hesitation that I signed up with one of these groups this summer, but it does make one a bit more comfortable buying a course that otherwise you might not think about, such as Rosetta Stone. As a long time language e-learning developer, I know the ups and downs of Rosetta Stone. I wouldn’t recommend it for all of your learning needs, and for some people it’s downright useless, especially the more engineering types who want to understand structure first. But for kids it’s just plain FUN. They like the pictures, the all audio format, the happy little sound when you get something correct.

My own Spanish e-learning system is still partially online via the demo here: http://www.instaspanish.com/dev/demo. There is a trick to load all of the lessons that you can’t see via the newletter section, I’ll share that later. The system is in Flash, which is why it’s abandoned. But anyway as for Rosetta Stone versus Duo Lingo, I have to say that Duo Lingo is an incredible free resource. For me, it’s probably more useful than Rosetta Stone as it uses a combination of a approaches instead of the all audio immersion approach. But using them together may be just the right combination. My son has decided to learn Italian, and my daughter is going for Spanish, after seeing that Japanese is very complicated. Her tolerance for frustration is very low, and the 3rd or 4th screen of the Rosetta Stone Japanese Demo had her wanting to throw the tablet at the wall. I’ll try to post back once they’ve used the Rosetta Stone and Duo Lingo for a bit longer, and see how they’re doing.

I decided earlier this year to try and put as many of my Flash apps online as I could, and ran in to some snags with replublishing some of the mobile apps as regular webapps, so I only got part way. But you can access a variety of what I was able to put online here at Learning Decks http://www.learningdecks.com.

I know many former Flash devs feel a bit melancholic about their old apps, as it’s such a waste to have all of those hours of coding go down the drain! I like to think that I learned a ton developing those apps though, and hopefully some of that experience shows when you use the Monster Coding app. I may try to offer some Spanish lessons in there, although right now that doesn’t really fit with a STEM oriented app. Anyway for anybody using a regular browser who is trying to learn Spanish, please take a look at the free stuff above, I’d love for it to still be useful for somebody!

While it looks like homeschooling 2 kids is going to be a rather short experiment, I did find what looks to be an awesome planning tool this week, Homeschool Manager - http://www.homeschoolmanager.com. The app is super HTML5, which I have a definite appreciation for… it is a joy to use, and laid out in a clear and intelligent manner. I’d love to see the ability to have a recurring schedule, but their tech support - which was both fast and friendly - assured me that I can drag and drop tasks from one week to the next. I originally got this more for my son, who is very schedule oriented, but I think he may end up back in regular school, so I’m not sure if I’ll get to keep using this. My daughter is extremely self guided in her learning, and seems to excel that way. A schedule might actually hamper her learning, and so far she’s jumped several grade levels in reading by doing her own thing, and with the help of phenomenal apps like Smarty Ants http://www.smartyants.com and Nessy http://www.nessy.com.

I may still try to use the Homeschool Manager to handle grades and what not, as well as for her reading log. Anyway for anybody homeschooling it’s worth a look, they’ve obviously worked hard on this app and as it’s HTML5 it should work across devices.

As we are experimenting with homeschooling 2 of our kids this semester, I’ve been hunting for good interactive reading resources. Our first grader delighted in using Smarty Ants http://www.smartyants.com last year, which was one of the coolest and most beneficial reading programs I’ve ever seen. But she finished it a few months back, and didn’t take very well to the Rosetta Stone Lexia app. And my son’s reading level is quite high for 3rd grade, although his comprehension definitely outpaces his grammar and spelling. I wanted something with short passages that would be engaging and offer some quizzing built in, and I was delighted to find Read Theory - http://www.readtheory.com.

This free webapp offers over 1000 passages created by some phD types in North Carolina with tons of educational experience, and the app is beautiful and very HTML5. While it can’t do everything, for a quick daily practice it seems like it will work great for us.

As coding geeks ourselves, this blog will also feature articles about our own development experiences. Last week was a pivotal moment in our development: I decided to go serverless. Even a week ago if I had put MonsterCoding.com online, it would have been served up by Node.js. I actually love Node.js, and it has made developing rich internet apps way easier. I have access to tons of cool libraries on my desktop that I can use in Grunt or via the command line to automate things, clean things up, process my templates and SASS files, etc.

But I am no expert at Node.js. And using it to actually serve up our website and app made me really nervous. Node.js has the scary habit of completing stopping over a small error. That means your entire site goes down, not just the offending page or process. As we are gearing up for the Hour of Code, the idea of app served by a backend that I cobbled together with online samples, and could crash at any moment, gave me a lot of pause! Then I read an article about Amazon’s JAWS stack. Basically, you keep your website itself static, then use the server stuff on an on demand basis. Eureka! What a sweet idea. Since our website and app are Backbone.js, Dust.js, and jQuery.js at the hear of things, extricating the login and some of the routes from Node.js was a breeze. Now I can just use an AWS Lambda for our social login, as well as saving user data to the Cloud.

The website is served up via Amazon’s Cloudfront, which has some 15 locations where they cache your files for quick serving. The caching is good and bad, mainly bad when you’re trying to get new changes live quickly. You have to actually manually invalidate things in the cache, which isn’t instant. Or set a no-cache header on the file, which means the file won’t be cached at all, which also isn’t a perfect scenario. But right now I am extremely excited about the serverless website, as it nips a bunch of potential problems in the bud, even before they have a chance to crop up.