CompuScholar Digital Savvy Course

CompuScholar Digital Savvy

Before your teen learns to code, make sure he knows his way around a computer. CompuScholar Digital Savvy is a comprehensive, year-long computer literacy course covering the practical technology skills your teen needs for school, work, and more advanced computer science courses.

And this is much broader than learning Microsoft Word.

Across 25 chapters, your teen explores computer hardware, software, operating systems, file management, networking, digital images and photo editing, databases, presentations, and productivity tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Google Docs. He'll also learn about internet communication, online safety, social media, basic HTML and web design, introductory programming concepts, and careers in information technology.

Social media is covered without requiring your teen to create or use live social media accounts—a distinction many homeschool parents will appreciate.

Each lesson combines an instructional video with written lesson material, discussion questions, and an automatically graded quiz. At the end of each chapter, your teen completes a hands-on activity or project and takes a chapter exam. The result is a useful mix of learning about technology and actually putting those skills to work.

And parents don't need an IT degree to teach it. With the self-study option, quizzes and exams are automatically graded, while rubrics and complete activity solutions help you evaluate the hands-on projects. Your parent account also lets you track progress and access teacher resources.

Digital Savvy is designed as an introductory Information Technology course and aligns with recognized state standards for computer and digital technology courses. That can be particularly helpful for high school families deciding how to describe the course on a transcript. CompuScholar also provides a detailed Course Syllabus and Planner, taking much of the guesswork out of pacing a full year.

This isn't a course for becoming an expert programmer. Instead, it gives your teen a broad foundation in the technology he's likely to encounter—and introduces enough web design and programming to help him decide whether he'd like to go further.

One practical note for homeschool recordkeeping: CompuScholar removes student accounts and data 30 days after a subscription ends. Download the grades and certificates you want to keep before then. Also, subscriptions are purchased per student, so siblings taking the course will each need their own license.

For the teen who can navigate apps all day but couldn't tell you much about what his computer is actually doing, Digital Savvy fills in an impressive number of gaps.