TOS Magazine Digital Edition Review

I have been given an opportunity to review The Old Schoolhouse Magazine - Digital Edition, and wanted to share with you what I think about it.

First of all, I love having my hard copy of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine. I love flipping through the pages, seeing what catches my eye first, then begin reading. Sometimes I even start at the beginning and read my way from front to back. However, with 6 children homeschooled, I rarely am able to read all the articles in one sitting, and it usually takes me several days to read all the way through. If I am interrupted from my reading, I will usually set the magazine down somewhere and, at times, forget about it - usually because it gets covered with other papers that migrate into my “office”. Now that I’ve had an opportunity to look at the digital version of the magazine online, I believe my hard copy will quickly take a back seat to the digital version. At least my hard copy will be in pristine condition from now on AND I’ll know where it is!

This digital version has many wonderful features. I really like the clickability (did I just create a new word?) of it. Even the front cover has clickable links. If you want, you can click once on any page to zoom in and click again and it zooms back out. You can download the magazine and save it for future reference. You can share pages with friends. You don’t have to worry about loaning your magazine out or tearing out pages to give to others anymore. You just click on the “Share” button, fill in the blanks, and it sends it. Now when you say to yourself, “So-and-so could use this information,” all you have to do is send it right then. No more procrastinating and no more lost “to-do” notes!

You can view all the pages of the magazine as thumbnails on one page. This is helpful if you are visual and remembering that you want to re-read a certain article, but not necessarily the title or subject. The thumbnails allow you to see all the page pictures and click on the one you want to see again and it goes straight to it. Can’t get any easier than that!

My favorite feature is the ability to search through the entire magazine for certain words or phrases. For instance, if I want to look up “Special Needs,” I type that into the search box and it returns up to 100 instances of those words or phrases, PLUS the words I chose to type in the box are highlighted. When you click on the link to the article that you want to go to, those pages now have the search words highlighted in the article as well. Say you clicked on the wrong link, well, you click on “Search” again, and it brings up the last thing you searched for with its links still there.

I definitely like the digital version of this magazine, which can be found at www.theoldschoolhousestore.com. I like being able to search, print, bookmark, save, and share articles with my friends. I think if you give it a try, you’ll be hooked.

Thanks for reading my review.