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Our Homeschool Community offers support and resources for homeschooling families in South Fort Worth, Crowley, Burleson, Joshua, and surrounding areas.  The Membership Fee helps to cover expenses including facility rental fees and supplies for special events, access to homeschooling resources such as the Scripps Spelling Bee,  and this secure, private, homeschooling forum for our local group. 

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Homeschool Community will maintain it's Facebook page.  It's a great resource for letting folks in the area know that there is a Homeschool group available to them.  We will continue to use the Facebook group to announce public events like Park Days and joint events with other area Homeschool groups.  

However, Facebook does not offer the privacy and member screening abilities that we enjoy on this forum.  Here, we have a database of member families, so we are able to get in contact with each other as needed.  

Here, we have an event scheduling tool that puts events on the calendar, allows folks to sign up and pay for field trips online, easy tracking of participants including wait lists if necessary, and weekly emails that help us all stay up to date on what events are scheduled and when.  On Facebook, there is no way to make sure all members see that an event has been posted and no way to collect payments and easily track participants. 

Here, we have a discussion forum that can be categorized by topic and where our questions won't be buried and lost in a matter of hours.  And members can choose to receive email updates on the topics of interest to them, and not to the ones that don't apply.   

Here, we have a calendar that allows tracking of field trips and events hosted by our group, as well as other events in the local area of interest to Homeschoolers.  

There are many other features that will be useful to our members, including a Classifieds section, an area for Homeschool families to advertise their personal businesses or businesses they'd recommend, a place to share photos of our homeschool events, and much more.

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Unfortunately with Yahoo, the truism is true: You get what you pay for.   Yahoo implemented an "upgrade" about a year ago that took away some functionality from the Groups that we liked and added features that were unwieldy and unreliable.  It is also particularly unfriendly to certain mobile devices, which a lot of our members rely on for access to information.  The changes have made the database and calendar functions nearly unuseable, which were two of the primary benefits to using Yahoo groups.  As a result, we've relied more on Facebook over the past year for event and calendar planning, but as noted in the Facebook question, this was not ideal either.

In this Homeschool Community forum, event planning is simplified, the calendar is streamlined and concise, and members will receive email notices of events they sign up for, changes that are posted, and new events as they are scheduled.  Homeschool-Life also sells a low cost App for both IPhones and Android, that will make accessing this forum on the go much simpler.  

This forum is also created by Homeschoolers, for Homeschoolers.  It's not a random website hosting group where we have to try to "make it work" for us.  The developers are familiar with the particular needs of homeschool groups and design the features to meet those needs.  

Moving forward, we believe this forum will better support the members of our Homeschool Community.  It will let us as Homeschooling Parents focus less on tracking field trip sign-ups and creating databases, and more on educating our kids and enjoying group activities with our Homeschooling friends.