My Access! Home Edition

We are a home of nine people and four computers. Losing Internet access is considered a major catastrophe. Finding educational opportunities that exist via computer is a major windfall. So you can imagine I was grateful to try out Vantage Learning's My Access! Home Edition Writing Instruction.

My Access! Home Edition is a subscription based, online writing program for ages 8-18. One of the nice things about being an online service is that you can sign on from any computer with an Internet connection. I have four children using a math software program on the desktop. They must take turns in order to complete the assignment. With the online access, whenever there is a computer free, it can be writing time.

There are assignments pre-loaded for you and divided by age group. As the parent, you can keep all the assignments available for them to choose from or set it to show only those you would like assigned. There is also an option to add in your own writing assignments, which makes this a much more versatile program.

The student will log in, choose the assignment they'd like to work on, and begin wherever they left off. My Access! covers planning, organizing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. The program will let the student know where their proficiency is at and suggest revisions.

As a parent, you can decide if you'd like points to be awarded for completing work and what the rewards for these points will be. These can be a great motivation to many kids and having the option integrated into the program is a nice bonus.

I was excited to begin with this and was hoping it would be just what my two weakest writers needed. Unfortunately, they weren't quite ready for it and instead found it frustrating. There wasn't enough instruction for the beginning writer, the spell check was rather picky; marking character's names wrong, as well as anything else it did not recognize. The grading was a bit tough for my struggling writers and seeing below proficient was not as motivating as I may have hoped. Revision suggestions were repeated frequently and I ended up with children in tears rather than excited to improve their writing.

This is one of those products that did not work for our family but may work well for yours. We may have enjoyed it more had I used it with one of my strong writers. Each child is different and a tightly structured writing program with tough expectations may be just what your child needs to thrive and grow as a writer. For us, it was frustrating. For others, it may be fulfilling.

My Access! Home Edition is available as a one year subscription for $99.95 for up to 3 students or $129.95 for up to six. Check out their web site for more information and to view a demo!

*Disclosure: This program was provided at no cost for review purposes.*