My Access Home Edition Review

I have had the pleasure of reviewing My Access Home Edition as part of my duties as a member of The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew.  My Access Home Edition is an online writing program that is designed to work with any writing curriculum.  While My Access Home Edition is not an independent writing program in and of itself, the program is designed to come alongside any writing curriculum and actively enhance the writing instruction.  My Access Home Edition is like having a writing tutor available for your children at all times.  My Access Home Edition is available for $99.95 for a one year's subscription for up to 3 children from the same family or $129.95 for up to 6 children.

Getting Started with My Access Home Edition
I found it VERY easy to set up an account on My Access Home Edition for each of my three children.  I even set up an account for myself as a student so that I would be able to explore the program without impacting the progress reports of my children.  Multiple demonstrations are available at the My Access Home Edition website that are quite helpful for learning more about the program.

• Setting Up Student Accounts Demonstration
• Managing and Creating Assignments Demonstration
• Reporting and Progress Demonstration
• Student Account Overview Demonstration

My Access Home Edition offers help to the homeschooling parent in many ways.  One way that My Access Home Edition can help with writing instruction is by offering 93 different writing assignments that are organized by age (8-10, 11-14, 15-18) and type of writing (narrative, persuasive, informative).  As the parent, you can choose to make all or only some of the writing assignments available to your student. 

My favorite part of the program, though, is that My Access Home Edition allows the homeschooling parent to enter their own assignments.  Therefore, it is quite easy to integrate My Access with many writing assignments in many different subjects.

So, how exactly does My Access Home Edition work?  To better understand the program before my children started using it, I decided to create a student account for myself and actually write an essay.  To help you better understand how the program works, I will walk you through the writing and revision process of my essay.  I chose the Ancient Civilizations writing prompt:

• Think about an ancient civilization you have studied.  What was life like?  How was it similar to life today?  How was it different?

Before starting my essay, I worked through part of the Informative Writing Course for Module 1.  My Access Home Edition offers writing instruction which can easily be accessed before or after completing a writing assignment.  During the Informative Writing Course, I was greeted as part of the Daily Access News Team.  While I thought the information in the course was very good, the student must read all of the information and the graphics are relatively simple.  While this may be excellent for some students who are easily distracted by bells and whistles, other children might enjoy a bit more excitement in the writing course.
The particular Informative Writing Course lesson I completed was about the 5 parts of the writing process.  Afterwards, I completed a short quiz.

After writing my essay, I was very pleased to find that I scored proficient on all 5 writing traits.  Once an essay is submitted, the essay is immediately graded and a score of 1 to 6 is given.  Essays are scored on 5 writing traits.  The following information was taken directly from the Parent User Guide:

1. Focus:  The extent to which the essays establish and maintain contolling ideas, address the purposes and audiences of the tasks, and complete the assignments.
2. Organization:  The extent to which the essays demonstrate unified structures and use transitional devices.
3. Content and Development:  The extent to which the essays develop ideas fully and creatively using specific, accurate, and relevant ideas.
4. Language Use:  The extent to which the essays demonstrate an awareness of the audiences and purposes of writing through effective sentence structures, sentence variety, and word choices.
5. Mechanics and Conventions:  The extent to which the essays demonstrate control of the conventions of English, including paragraphing, grammar, punctuation, and spelling rules.

Essays are instantly graded using IntelliMetric which is an artificial intelligence scoring engine.  Interestingly, the score given by IntelliMetric and the score given by an expert human scorer agrees 97-99% of the time.

My first score was 3.9 (I wrote the essay quickly!).  After revising the essay using the list of revision goals that were given to me, I brought my score up to 4.3.  Even though my score was in the proficient range, I wanted to earn a higher score, so I revised my essay some more and ended with a score of 4.9.
 
Here is my finished essay, after revisions, to give you a better idea of what a proficient essay might look like as graded by IntelliMetric in the 8-10 year old informative essay category:
Have you ever wished you could travel back to the grandeur of the time of pyramids and pharaohs? Of all the ancient civilizations, ancient Egypt is filled with the most intrigue. Powerful pharaohs, pyramids, and intricate burial rituals; there is much to fascinate one about ancient Egypt. While there are some aspects of life in ancient Egypt that are similar to today, much about life in ancient Egypt is different from life today. Ancient Egyptians were different from people today in three areas which are discussed in this essay: educating children, burial rituals, and attitudes towards cats.


While parents in ancient Egypt loved their children and held family life to be important, just like most parents today, many aspects of raising children were different in ancient Egypt. One significant difference is that ancient Egyptian children rarely attended school. Today, compulsory schooling is the norm in the United States and many other countries. Not so in ancient Egypt. While some boys went to school to become scribes, most learned the trade of their father, such as farming. Girls did not attend school and were taught to be homemakers by their mothers at home. This system of education worked very well for the ancient Egyptians, though, as they maintained a stable and rewarding way of life for over 3,000 years. While differences in educating children exist, differences in how the dead are treated also exist.

Ancient Egyptian people mourned their dead and buried their loved ones, just like people today. On the other hand, much about the burial process was quite different in ancient Egypt. Mummification was common in ancient Egypt whereas today dead people are not mummified. For Pharaohs, in particular, the burial rituals were extremely detailed and significant. We are still learning about the elaborate tombs built for pharaohs in pyramids. The artwork, treasures, and sophistication in these ancient tombs still amazes us today.

Lastly, people in ancient Egypt and today revere cats as pets. Cats were particularly valuable to the ancient Egyptians in that they protected the precious grain supply from mice and other rodents. In ancient Egypt, though, cats were often worshipped as gods. Cats were so important to many ancient Egyptians, that some even had their cats mummified after death!

There are many differences between ancient Egyptian culture and today's culture including differences in childrearing, burial practices, and our attitudes towards cats. Few ancient cultures fascinate us as much as ancient Egypt. It is likely the mystery and marvels of ancient Egypt will continue to fascinate and astound future generations as well.

Revision Goals
The help offered to me in revising the essay came in two forms, My Revision Goals and My Editor.  My Revision Goals are keyed to excellent writing and based on the submitted essay.  They are not, though, specific to the particular essay and topic.  For example, one suggestion for me was to "Give your essay a good introduction" which was followed by clear and specific ways to accomplish this task in general but not for my particular essay.

My Editor
On the other hand, My Editor offers proofreading advice which is completely specific to the particular essay.  The suggestions go way beyond a simple spell checker.  My Editor finds and suggests ways to fix grammar errors, spelling errors, and awkward phrasing.

Publishing the Essay
After I was all done revising, I was given the option to publish my essay.  I was able to choose a color style (Ocean Blue) and my published essay looked like a newspaper story.  I was also able to e-mail the essay which I thought was a wonderful feature for students who are working on laptops without attached printers.  As well, the option is available to simply print the essay in a normal fashion without the newspaper format.

Activities
My Access Home Edition offers much more than assignments and essay grading.  In addition to the aforementioned Writing Courses, the program also offers Activities which can be completed in order to earn Activity Points.  Activities are short, interactive worksheets regarding all aspects of the writing process.  For example, one activity that I completed was a short passage to read  followed by three questions regarding:

• where a comma should be placed
• the best way to combine sentences
• the best place to add a sentence.

Activity Points
Activity Points are earned by the student for completing and revising essays, taking writing courses, and completing activities.  As the parent, you can set the point goal for your children and specify rewards for meeting the point goals.  So, for example, you might specify that a child needs to earn 500 points to gain the reward of a trip to the ice cream shop to pick out the treat of his or her choice.

Writing Helps for the Student
When writing essays, students can find a wide variety of writing helps available at the click of a mouse including:

• the rubric used to grade essays
• writer's models
• writer's guides
• outline help
• focus checklist
• word count
• thesaurus.

Progress Reports for the Parent
Lastly, as the parent, My Access Home Edition offers easily accessed tools for you to view the progress in detail of each of your children.  As the parent you can view:

• the specific feedback given to your students
• the revision goals for any essay submitted
• overall progress on a below proficient to advanced proficient scale
• Activity points earned
• scored essays in detail
• how many essays have been completed.

Overall, I think My Access Home Edition would be extremely helpful for many homeschooling parents, but particularly those who do not feel confident grading their children's writing.  The goal of My Access Home Edition is certainly not to take the teacher out of the writing process, though.  Even with this program, a parent will still need to be quite involved in the writing instruction of one's children.  In working with the program, my children have found it difficult to achieve "advanced proficient" in all five writing traits.  Therefore, my goal has been for them to reach the Proficient category in all five writing traits.  From my experience, if an essay is given a "proficient" rating by IntelliMetric, the essay is what I condider to be very good writing. 

If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will answer any questions based on my experience with My Access Home Edition.

I received a one year subscription to My Access Home Edition for the purpose of reviewing the product.  No other reward, monetary or otherwise, was given in exchange for this review.