The Homeschool Conference Recordings Available Free

The Homeschool Conference, an effort by Steve Hargadon and myself, was successfully launched last weekend. We had over 55 recordings completed, which include the audio-visual presentations when you listen to them via Blackboard Collaborate (a free download), and they are available for listening here at no charge. We are particularly grateful to all the keynotes and distinguished speakers who gave their time and who helped to promote the event, and to all the presenters who provided a great range of topics that are usually not featured at physical homeschooling events.

Steve Hargadon described the conference concept this way to attendees:

[It] is not just about attending and learning (which we hope you are doing!), but also about providing significant encouragement to present. Because an online conference doesn't have the physical and financial constraints (and sometimes the politics) of an in-person event, we can accept the great majority of presentation proposals and allow the audience to decide what they want to attend. This means that the experience of presenting, which can be hard to come by for someone who hasn't done so before, is available to all. The great surprise of having done this process now for four years (hurrah!) is that the quality of the presentations remains significantly high. So we encourage you to be brave and to consider presenting at one of the following conferences.

We are planning to do another free, online, global homeschooling conference in early 2014; will you consider presenting at it? There's plenty of room for you! Here are some presentations from the inaugural conference that you can listen to and get your creative juices flowing:

• Home Education in England and Wales.
• Homeschooling UK Comparision of 4-5 year olds in and out of school.
• Princeton Learning Cooperative: Helping teens live and learn without school.
• Transforming learners into global citizens through Wikipedia.
• Using Online Resources to Teach Math vs. Training Kids in Math
• The Feminist Homeschooler.
• Writing Homeschooling Goals.

And here is a list of the Keynote speakers and their talks:

• Pat Farenga: The Legacy of John Holt.
• Clark Aldrich: Unschooling Rules.
• Jerry Mintz: The global movement for learner-centered alternatives.
• Cindy Gaddis: Learning Disabled or Learns Differently? Understanding and Honoring the Natural Learning Path for Right-Brained Children.
• Eliot Washor: How to Increase Student Engagement Focusing on Student Expectation.
• David Albert: The Average Giraffe sleeps 4.6 hours a day.
• Dr. Peter Gray: Free to Learn

I hope you'll enjoy these presentations and share them with others. Please let me know, through this site or homeschoolconference.com, your thoughts and opinions about how we can make this event more powerful and useful for learners everywhere.