In this growing age of technology, tablets are becoming ever more popular. As a homeschooling mama, I love having technology right at my fingertips, to enhance my schooling, and give my students another media to learn from.

The Vivatar tablet that I received to review is a 7-inch, android tablet. The one that was sent to me also came with a hard cover, which is sold separately. Since my girls were primarily going to be using this, I chose the Hello Kitty cover. I found the cover to be sturdy and easy to put onto the tablet. You can also choose other themes such as Barbie themes, My Little Pony, and Hot Wheels. Several applications come with the tablet, including Gmail, Google Chrome, and YouTube. There are tabs that you can organize your apps into; these tabs include Apps, Games, Social, and Tools. I appreciated this because it already has some apps in the tabs and so it made it easier to set up. Besides the tabs, there are several pages of space that you can put various apps and games on. You can also add other users on the tablet if you choose, and specify a password and theme for each user.

The tablet also comes with a few installed games. Some of the games that are included are Jewels, (In this game you line up jewels on a game board to score points.) Checkers, which has both a multiplayer and single player game; and Chess, which is also multiplayer and single player. It also came with Kid Coloring and Kid Numbers, plus a few more kid-type games. Using Play Store, you can choose from over 700,000 games and apps to download to the tablet. Although this device only has 4 gigabytes of storage, my children were able to put six or seven games onto it.

This device can take pictures and videos, using both rear and front cameras. We did find though that the video quality was poor. There are options to edit photos, which my kids loved doing. They really enjoyed creating interesting collages and emailing them to me. The tablet gives accurate information on the battery life. There is a choice of having a password for the tablet or a slide screen lock. This would be very useful as a parent and gives you control over when and who uses the tablet. You can also pick different languages and time zones, and there is a dictionary that you can use and edit. There is also a setting for choosing the date format as well as being able to select large text or ‘speak’ passwords. I really appreciate the parental controls on this device. You can’t control the time spent on the tablet, but you can control what each user has access to. This makes it perfect for younger children and really makes it a multi-age device.

Although the tablet doesn’t have a lot of storage space, it is a very good device for homeschoolers who would want to use it in a co-op setting or for individual schooling. I found it especially useful when I needed to show a video or photos in our homeschooling co-op; I had the device right there with me, and could pass it around with appropriate photos on what we were studying. I could also use it to show YouTube videos, but being the standard tablet size, only a few kids at a time could watch it at a time. I also used it for educational games, especially for my nine year-old. She liked playing math games and enjoyed the mobility of having a tablet. My older three used this tablet primarily for games in their free time. We took a road trip a couple of months ago, and they loved being able to pass the time with the tablet. We did notice a couple of time that it would just shut down on us, and the battery itself rarely lasted more than 2 hours. It also seemed to have trouble connecting to Wi-Fi, and would heat up pretty quickly.

I did love having the tablet as another media source for our schooling. And this really is perfect for younger children, with the simplicity of the format and the parental controls. As homeschoolers it is good to realize that modern technology can really aid in our schooling when used properly. And this inexpensive tablet from Vivitar just might be the perfect fit for you.

-Product Review by Charlotte Gochnauer, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, October, 2015