This is a guest post from Misty Bailey – a homeschooling Mom and writer at the popular parenting blog We’re Just Parents.

As a homeschooler I am sure your children have many projects they complete in school. Some may be Science Experiments, Book Reports, History Papers, or Geography Lessons. Biteslide allows your children to make these projects, and findings more creative. Here are some ways you or your children can make your homeschool projects more creative with Biteslide.

Tips to Consider Before You Start

When you use Biteslide for homeschool projects you are allowing your child to learn valuable computer skills. Skills learned can be web research, typing, using a mouse, saving images, uploading images, and many more!

Biteslide is really easy to use but some parental help and guidance at first may help. Give your child extra points for completing the project on Biteslide. Make the projects fun and interesting. Show the child how to use it before setting them lose to create a slidebook.

If your children learn subjects together, allow them to work together on a slidebook. When it comes to using photos for reports keep in mind copyright laws. The photos and slidebooks on Biteslide are for personal use, but to be safe always disclose where the picture comes from.

Homeschool Science

Did your child complete a Science Experiment that they loved? Do they have one they will be completing soon? Have them make a slidebook about it. On one page he can write his hypothesis, the next section pictures of the actual experiment. You can list the experiment step by step, or a general synopsis.

Ultimately the slidebook is yours, and how you complete it is in your hands! On the last page the student can write out their findings from the experiment. The Slidebook can bring his Science Experiment to life!

Homeschool Book Reports

Giving a book report for a homeschooler is different than having to give one in front of a class of 20 kids. There is not a real challenge involved, you write it and turn it in.

But, with Biteslide you can assign a book report that the child will have fun presenting, and challenge them at the same time by allowing them to learn valuable computer skills!

The child can make a slidebook showing the author, genre, characters, settings, summary and more with Biteslide! He can find pictures to add online, or draw and upload them himself. Biteslide also allows you to add stickers to your slidebook. These can help the child show the mood in the story as they retell or summarize it.

Individual Homeschool Projects

Do you have a child who wants to learn about airplanes, trains, giraffes or another subject that she finds interesting?

Help the child look up and research information. Or, if they are old enough allow them to do it themselves. Write up the information and turn it into a fun individual project with Biteslide!

For example, let’s say a child wanted to do a project on planes. They could write down the information they found about when planes were invented. They could write down some about the Wright Brothers and their first flight. They could save pictures that they found on the Wright Brothers, and use them in their slidebook.

They could write down books that they found on planes, and refer to them as resources in their slidebook. How have planes changed through the years? Make a neat collage showing the way planes looked a century ago compared to now.

The slidebook can be full of information the child found on their point of interest. You could also take this same scenario and turn it into a project and report for History or a Geography lesson.

Is your child studying a particular country or state? Are you learning about presidents? How about a great scientist or inventor? Take the information you have found and make a slidebook out of it – the opportunities for individual projects are limitless!

So, the next time you decide to do a fun project with your kids take the opportunity and make your homeschool project more creative with Biteslide!

Register Here For Your Free Biteslide Account.

Kathryn Rose is an full-time educator turned full-time mom and writer focusing on parenting and educational topics. After completing her Elementary Education Certification through North Park University, she taught middle school Social Studies in Chicago, IL. She still teaches part-time and loves putting together engaging lesson plans and activities that keep kids engaged and moving.

For the lone teacher, the implementation of a productive and enriching lesson plan can be an exhaustive and worrisome endeavor. Sure, your school district might have set-up a basic framework that meets benchmarks and standards but, like every educational checklist that teachers have to deal with, there are certainly those students that “fall through the cracks.”

Whether they entered into your classroom already reading below their grade level, struggle with a crippling learning disability, or just don’t invest themselves fully in school, finding activities that engage the more challenging student can feel like walking the tight rope in a failing circus tent.

At the very base of the learning pyramid are the foundational skills of reading, assessing, and internalizing information. For many students, being able to express and share what they have learned gives them an opportunity to further extend important classroom content.

Technology can offer an interesting development in what can feel like a losing battle.

Yes, kids love their social networking sites and chat sessions with friends, but computer-based programs might be the landscape change needed to provide students with authentic opportunities to learn.

Coupled with engaging assignments that have a personal or creative touch, many children would relish in the opportunity to breakaway from their textbooks and apply what they have learned to an organized and shareable project.

More so, tasks started on the computer are easy to store and retrieve for later use making them the perfect medium for projects that can showcase a students progress throughout the school year.

They can easily interact with archived ideas, ask themselves questions, view their growth, and share their achievements with others. Secondly- special projects can be fun and can offer a change of pace for both the student and the teacher.

Programs like Biteslide make it easy for teachers to integrate a variety of curriculum into student-driven projects. Students can create slides that integrate textbook learning with outside resources that can be found online and then clipped or cached for later use.

It offers them opportunities to assess content as they strive to put together something new and personal. They get to be the teacher and share, in their own words, what they have learned in the classroom.

While programs like Biteslide are perfect for review and one-time use projects, Biteslide is also an excellent resource for those teachers looking to have assignments that extend over an entire school year.

With Biteslide, it is easy to store information and clips for later use. The entire project is retrievable and printable. It can offer your students a special time during the week to hone in on computer skills that will take them the distance while also reinforcing curriculum learned from the previous week.

My next few blog posts will include lesson plans that can help you extend your use of Biteslide throughout the entire school year.

Some of the lessons are easy and will simply teach your students the basics of online slide presentations. Other projects will hopefully give you an idea as to how to extend your classroom curriculum into a yearlong Biteslide presentation that will be fun to make and reflective of a student’s progress throughout their year in your classroom.

If you don’t already have an account on Biteslide, sign up for free here.

This is a guest post from Misty Bailey – a homeschooling Mom and writer at the popular parenting blog We’re Just Parents.

When I first heard about Biteslide, I wasn’t sure what to think. I am not tech savvy, and have little to no experience creating slideshows. I had read the reviews though, and wanted to give it a try. We are a homeschooling family, and my children are 9, 7 and 2. Biteslide is geared towards educators, so it may be difficult to imagine how a homeschooler like me would utilize Biteslide into her daily or weekly classroom schedule. However, it was surprisingly easy, and my children really enjoyed it as well. I would like to share with you some of the ways that we were able to incorporate Biteslide into our homeschool curriculum.

1. Class Projects

My girls use Apologia Science. Currently we are on Flying Creatures of the 5th Day. I was able to take some of our projects and put them into a really fun slideshow. We were able to document materials used, hypothesis, results, and what we learned. This was a fun way to make our projects more engaging.

2. Book Reports

My daughters do a book report each month over a particular genre like Historical Fiction, Mystery or Humor. They choose a book from this genre and present a book report on it. My oldest was able to make her book report into a slideshow using Biteslide. She made it a fun interactive project. Instead of standing up and reading her report out load to her father, siblings and I, she gave it using her own slidebook. A fun twist on a familiar theme.

3. Portfolios

Most homeschooling families like to keep a portfolio of their children’s work. Biteslide is a great way to do that! As their teacher I went into Biteslide and created a class for some of our subjects like Health, History and Science. As the year progresses I can make slidebooks documenting some of the projects we have done in this class. The slidebooks I am making for these subjects are much like scrapbooks. This is a useful and visually appealing way to document much of our work done throughout the year.

4. Individual Lessons and Projects

Children are living in a tech savvy world. They will need to know computer skills that we don’t in order to succeed in the future. Biteslide is a great website to teach children computer skills. It’s really easy to assign projects to your kids on Biteslide. Some examples could be an ‘All about Me’ project, or a specific holiday project like having them pick a president to study for President’s Day and use Biteslide to do a report.

5. Group Co-op Projects

I am planning on using Biteslide in January for our homeschool groups American Girl Co-op. I thought it would be fun to have the girls work ‘together’ from their own homes on a project about Addy, the American Girl we will be studying and the time period she lived in. With the homeschool teacher plan you can have 5 students, so keep that in mind if you plan a group project.

If you homeschool I really recommend that you to look into incorporating Biteslide into your homeschool curriculum. There is a free account so you can try it – it lets you create one one project and as many slidebooks as you like. Biteslide is a great way to make projects more engaging, incorporate computer skills, and an easy way for children to show off their creativity – a fun way to learn in the 21st century!

Register here for your free Biteslide account.