Technology can improve your homeschool lessons in a lot of different ways. It gives you access to new information and creates new ways to teach tricky subjects and make them more engaging. However, a lot of people stay away from technology when homeschooling because they worry that it’s a distraction. They assume that if you give kids a tablet or a laptop, they will stop paying attention and start playing games or messing around on the internet instead. In a lot of cases, that is exactly what will happen but if you avoid using technology, you miss out on a lot of great teaching tools. What you should be doing instead is finding ways to prevent distractions while also getting the full benefit of using technology in your lessons. Here’s how you can prevent distractions when using technology during homeschool lessons. 

Make The Activities Interesting

If your child gets distracted every time you do an activity on the computer, you should consider whether you are making the tasks engaging enough or not. If you ask your child to copy out of the textbook onto their laptop, for example, they’re going to get bored very quickly and start finding other ways to entertain themselves. On the other hand, if you use fun sites with interactive activities to practice math, that’s far more engaging than a normal math lesson and your child is less likely to get distracted. You should only use technology if it is improving the lesson in some way, or it just becomes a distraction. 

Monitor Their Screen 

Monitoring your child’s screen is the best way to make sure that they stay on track and don’t get distracted during the lesson. There is some great teaching software for K-12 schools that is just as effective for managing computer use during homeschool sessions. You can see exactly what they are up to and, if necessary, lock their screen so they pay attention to you while you are talking.

Parents often think that blocking distracting websites is the way forward but when blocking distracting content, you can also block a lot of educational content at the same time. Take a site like Youtube, for example. It does have a lot of distracting content on there but there are also some amazing educational videos on there, and you miss out on that if you block the entire site. That’s why monitoring their use is better than blocking sites, in most cases. 

Allow Regular Breaks 

If your child is constantly getting distracted during lessons, it may not have anything to do with the technology at all. It might just be because they are not getting enough breaks and they can’t concentrate for that long. A child’s attention span isn’t that long, especially when they are young, so trying to get them to concentrate for an hour at a time won’t work. If you break up your lessons and give them a short break every 20 minutes or so, you should notice a big difference. 

Technology can be a distraction but if you ban it completely, you are missing a lot of great opportunities. But if you follow these simple tips, you can get all of the great benefits of technology in the classroom without the distractions.