I don't know about you, but sometimes I get tired of driving. We live in a very rural area so to get anywhere we need to go it seems we have to drive 30 minutes one way. Worse case being an event where I don't stay and I drive home only to turn around an hour later to pick the kids up. Co-oping is so important for the kids so they get educational opportunities I cannot always provide (like foreign language. I am hopeless!), for them to have social outlets, and so I can work with other moms to make all our teaching load lighter by us each taking a topic to teach so we don't have to civer it all ourselves.

The internet to the rescue! Now we have tools to do co-ops online. The kids have live, online classrooms where they can meet together with a teaching homeshool mom (or dad) and other students. They can access collaborative class activities and student social tools all through the time outside of classtime too. The cost is free to very little because it is a co-op setting. Let the car sit idle. I like it!

Even if you live close enough to find driving to be no big deal, wouldn't it be great to meet together one day a week for labs or other hands-on activities, but have class meetings in a live, online classroom throughout the rest of the week. I remember when I taught the chemistry co-op. Our lab days were packed with tons of information and we met for a morning and afternoon session to get it all in. How much easier it would have been if I could have done the class lecture part online with the kids and then the lab day would have just been labs.

Here are some tools if you think an online co-op would be interesting:

Virtual Homeschool Group: You can set up a course site at VHSG free. Make your own from scratch, or jump in to one of the courses designed for multiple homerooms (your co-op would be one) and share the resources with other co-ops teaching the same subject.

Elluminate vRoom:  This is a fantastic, live online classroom. This is a 3-seater version, but you can get a 10-seat Lite-Office version for just $50/month. Not much when the cost is split among multiple families in a co-op.