If you are educating your child at home, there’s no reason to eschew help, and there are certainly some gadgets for home schoolers that will bring benefits to the home-based classroom, for both parent and child. You don’t have to fill your study space with a mass of technology to be an effective tutor for your child, but some well chosen gadgets for home schoolers will enable and ease the process.
This looks like a tablet but you can write on it with a stylus and it acts like your PC monitor and tablet in one. It is one of the more high tech gadgets for home schoolers as they are quite expensive, but are very useful for anything from making mind maps to creating presentations. The animators for the TV show South Park use very large LCD tablet/writing pads to animate their shows.
Write on a pad and what you write comes up on the screen. It takes a little getting used to, but some graphic designers find it useful, and people who find the movement of a mouse difficult too. It is not ideal if you have to switch from writing on the keyboard to using the pen, but students who are used to working on screens may prefer explanations written on the screen than on paper.
Learning something via a large screen will have the content stick more thoroughly in the mind of the user. It is also a great tool for the home teacher and beats out the white or black board every time. It also allows the student to watch educational and non-educational movies. By watching presentations on a larger and more dynamic screen (such as a digital projector) it places the images more firmly into the student's mind than just seeing it flipped through a textbook. Size, color and impact does matter which is why months later a person is more likely to remember things seen at the cinema over things watched on a smaller TV. This is especially beneficial if your child is a visual learner type.
Are you schooling your kids at home? Are you sticking to traditional methods of textbooks and paper and pen, or have you embraced technology? What gadgets for homeschoolers do you recommend?