60-day returns • free shipping on USA orders $129+
We really enjoyed “meeting” you and talking with you at the Webinars last week! You had lots of great questions and lots of great suggestions. A couple of questions came up frequently, and we would like to answer those for everyone. (Those of you who attended the Webinars already know the answers, but sometimes it’s nice to see it all written down in one place.)
Now, for those of you who are mostly interested in our CM teaching tips, we realize that the past few posts have been focused on the CM Organizer. That’s because it’s new and we need to get the information to everyone. We promise that we’ll get back to those practical how-to’s soon!
In this post, our webmaster and collaborator on this Web site, Doug, will answer the question: Why is the CM Organizer an online service instead of a piece of software that I can just install on my own computer? I really appreciate Doug’s ability to make technology easy to understand. I think you’ll find his comments below very helpful!
When we set out to build the CM Organizer, we listed many important goals. I’m sure you can guess the main goal: an organizer that is Charlotte Mason specific. But we also wanted to create some specific features and found that they really worked best as an online service. Here are a few of the features and advantages we had in mind.
- Sharing books — The CM Bookfinder works best shared. We’re constantly adding books, and you have access to them instantly without downloading a software update. We plan to add some more features in the near future that will allow everyone to share the books they’ve entered in some pretty creative ways. The community will be able to help each other, and that saves you time.
- For both Mac and Windows — We wanted to make sure everyone could use the CM Organizer on their computers. All you need is fairly modern Web browser software. The Organizer is not built just for Windows or just for Mac. It’s for everyone. That was important to us.
- No software installations — You can avoid the hassles of downloading and installing software. Ever had a software installation go bad and mess up the rest of your computer? Do you like spending time messing with the computer instead of getting school things done? With an online service, you don’t have to worry about that.
- Continual upgrades — We’re continuously improving the CM Organizer and making those new features instantly available to everyone. You don’t have to wait for a big yearly update to get your bug fixes or a new feature. These continual upgrades also allow you to learn one new feature at a time as we add them, instead of a whole book of new features all at once.
- Use it anywhere — We wanted you to be able to use the CM Organizer anywhere you can find a Web browser. With an online service, you can update your records from the library or on vacation at a hotel or a relative’s house. We make it secure so you have that flexibility.
We think those are some pretty significant advantages over the software we’re all used to installing on our computers. There’s one more huge advantage involving security and backups that we’ll cover next time.
Wow, thank you for the CM organizer again. I love the fact that it is such a wonderful tool for ONGOING organization. I love the fact that you planned it with such vision that different computers can use it and that while in a library on vacation, or visiting far from home, I could add a book while away! Very wonderful. Most of all, I really really really etc. appreciate that all the children can be listed in one location; then separate accounts made within reach. On my previous countless other organizer missions I would get very excited that it was “the one” only to find that it took too much time to fill in each child’s work daily OR weekly, and when some of the kids filled it out themselves, they were also very inconsistent.
The family section is great too because I can now print out an individual child’s list for each child’s record-keeping, AND a list of family read alouds, or educational media that we read, heard, or saw together and give a copy to EACH CHILD for record keeping. My only comment for future improvement of “choices of categories” after choosing subject, book, and chapter etc. would be the ability to choose 2 options…ie. read together and did a hands-on-activity (Like in The Story of the World –we read the chapter and do an activity). As it stands, I beleive one can only choose one or the other. Anyway, I love it and am telling two friends so they can tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on!!!! 🙂 with tremendous thanks,
Christine
Thanks for your nice comments. You have no idea how encouraging it is to us to hear that others are finding this useful and enjoying it.
By the way, I think you could get around not being able to enter two methods by scheduling the same resource twice and setting one to be used with the other.
I just wanted to encourage you and say that I like the fact that the CM Organizer is online. I like that you are always improving it. In fact, today I was working on our scheduling and I noticed some new helps and tips that were not there before. I also like that I can use it from different computers, not just “my” computer. I have wanted to work on our schedule recently and my kids were using my computer to watch a movie, I was glad I could just use the laptop. I am still figuring out how to use it in the best most efficient way, but so far I do really like using it.
And also, thank you for a very quick email response to questions I had asked about using the organizer.
Jenny