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Homeschooling

Guide: Ann Zeise

A note from Ann:

As I had been homeschooling since 1993, I originally applied for the homeschooling site, but it was already assigned. The guide, however, left in May 1997, and I applied, was accepted and reopened the site in August 1997 and ran it until May 1999, when my contract was terminated without any reasonable explanation nor was I given any hearing or chance to defend myself.

I thought, like most other guides, that the pages with aa and bl file names were my own content, so I moved them over to what has become A to Z Home's Cool Homeschooling website. The About.com lawyers started sending threatening letters, promising financial ruin if I did not remove the files. I got some legal help myself, and was able to fend off the wolves by substantially editing the material with the help of some of my home schooling author friends.

Within a week of my termination, the site was handed over to a fundamentalist Christian home school mom who turned the site into a subdirectory for the reconstructionist movement. This made me suspect that my termination had something to do with pressure from a fundamentalist advertiser who didn't care for my inclusive approach to the topic of homeschooling.

A to Z Home's Cool is now a substantial site, garnering awards such as USA Today's Education Site of the Week. It has about 900 pages as of January 2002, and received its 2 millionth visitor December 1, 2001, since it became independent. It has been seeing an 8% growth each month. I expect over 200,000 unique visitors this month, January 2002, and 300,000 a month by June.

It is financed by affiliate relationships and advertising and direct appeal for donations. In the future there will be custom, private areas for vendors and those wishing access to my huge community. I don't charge families for any information, just if they want to buy learning materials. Vendors of "off topic" products must pay to be on the site.

As A to Z Home's Cool covers many learning topics (under Explorations 4 Kids), I welcome link suggestions from my friends who have left About.com. I have already linked up a good number of you at your new sites, but can't claim to have found them all. Use the search engine on my site to see if you are there somewhere, or if your former site needs a new link. Also look in the "All New" pages to see if I only recently linked your site. I sometimes get behind at updating the search engine, though I try to do it weekly or when I create new pages.

If you have a topic that would appeal to homeschoolers, and are looking for a new home for your material, please email me and I'll see what we can do. I'm not making as much, but I'm sure having fun. My sites are located on Internet Genesis, which is an entrepreneurial incubator. This is a great place to start up an online business.

Ann's  Sites

Contact Ann at: homeschoolguide@gomilpitas.com