Reading the Facebook blog was fun last night when I saw that they finally figured out how to verify homeschoolers and allow them to join.  This hit a sweet spot for myself, since I was homeschooled since I was 5 years of age.  I got very used to being treated differently, it’s nice to see that Facebook is adding this very fast growing educational group to the private social networking space.  Former homeschooler and current Facebook employee Christina Holsberry had this to say about the announcement:

“We’ve been working on ways to solve this (allowing homeschoolers)—we want minors to use Facebook safely above all. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve recently come up with a way for homeschoolers to join. We’ve created a new verification system—one that doesn’t depend on being in a high school, but still provides the level of security we believe is required. So welcome, everyone, to Facebook.”

I do not believe that this additional feature will give a dramatic increase in traffic to Facebook since most homeschoolers I know already use the service anyways, however it illustrates that Facebook is a forward thinking company that pays attention to groups that are ignored by other social networking organizations.

The National Center for Education in 2003 conducted a study and found over 1.1 million homeschool students, that number has grown considerably since that time.  For the full report, please click here.  The homeschooling community has been known for being early adopters in the technology space and this move by Facebook should help to become the “champion” of homeschoolers everywhere.

Kudos to Facebook on this one.