Frequently asked questions

Toka is a free catalogue of educational resources — books, videos, courses and DVDs — reviewed by the home-educating parents, teachers and students who actually use them. Every listing gathers honest ratings in one place, so you can decide before you buy. Browse the catalogue to see what's there.

Home-educating parents choosing curriculum, teachers looking for material that works, and older students researching their own courses. You don't have to follow any particular programme — the catalogue covers Classical Conversations, Abeka, BJU Press, Sonlight, The Good and the Beautiful, Memoria Press and many more, alongside ordinary books and videos.

Yes. Browsing, searching, reading reviews, writing reviews and submitting resources are all free, and they will stay free — that's how the catalogue grows. Toka is funded by affiliate commissions when someone buys through one of our seller links, at no extra cost to you.

Not to browse or read. You need a free account to write a review, submit a resource, save a shopping list or set a price alert — reviews are tied to a real account so that ratings mean something. Create an account in about a minute.

Search for a curriculum or book you already own and read what other families said about it. Then leave your own review — the resources you've already used are the ones you can help someone else with. If something you use is missing, submit it.

Open Submit a resource and paste a link — a product page, a YouTube or Vimeo video, a publisher's own store page. Toka fills in the title, description, author and cover image where it can, and you correct anything that came through wrong. A moderator reads it before it goes live.

Anything a family learns from: books and curriculum, videos, online courses and DVDs. It doesn't have to be written for home education, and it doesn't have to be in print. What gets turned down is spam, self-promotion dressed up as a resource, duplicates of something already listed, and anything not meant for learners.

A person reads every submission and every review before it is published, so it isn't instant — usually a few days. If something has been waiting much longer than that, write to us and we'll look.

Open the resource's page and choose Write a review. Give it a star rating and say what worked and what didn't — how old your learners were, how much prep it took, whether you'd use it again. Concrete detail is what the next family is reading for.

Not from the site yet. You can post one review per resource, and once it's submitted you can't change or remove it yourself — so it's worth a second read before you send it. If you need one corrected or taken down, write to us and a moderator will handle it.

Not purely by how recent they are. Reviews from people whose earlier reviews other well-rated reviewers found helpful carry more weight, so a thoughtful review keeps helping long after it's written. Nobody can buy a position, and publishers don't get a say.

Yes, and we'd rather say so plainly. Some seller links are affiliate links: if you buy through one, Toka earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, Toka earns from qualifying purchases. Commissions never affect a rating, a review, or where a resource appears — the price panel is sorted by price, not by what pays us.

Every review, resource, profile photo and display name has a Report control. Pick a reason, add detail if it helps, and it goes straight to a moderator's queue. You're never shown to the person you reported.

Resources are tagged with age and year-level ranges, and you can browse by them directly. A family can set a maximum age level so that older material is filtered out, and a child profile in the planner sees only the resources you've made visible to it. Uploaded images and text are screened for offensive content before they publish.

A small team of Toka moderators — real people, not an automated filter on its own. Automated checks screen images and text first, but a moderator makes every publish, reject and takedown decision.

We keep what your account needs to work and what tells us which pages are useful, and we don't sell any of it. The Privacy Policy lists exactly what's stored and why, and the Cookie Policy covers what we set in your browser.

Yes. There's no self-service button for it yet, so write to us from the address on the account and we'll remove it. Tell us in the same message if you want the reviews you've published taken down too.

Toka checks the sellers that carry a title — Amazon, Rainbow Resource, ChristianBook, AbeBooks, ThriftBooks, eBay, the publisher's own store and used-curriculum marketplaces — and shows what each is asking, new and used, cheapest first. The checking happens in the background rather than while you wait for the page.

Either none of the sellers we check has that title right now, or we haven't managed to match it to their listing yet. Prices are also cached for around an hour, so one that changed a moment ago can lag. Always check the seller's own page before you buy — theirs is the price that counts.

We add them. Which sellers appear, and in what order, follows the country your family has set, so a family in the UK isn't sent to a US-only store first. Sellers can't pay to be listed or to be ranked higher.

Use Report this resource on the page, choose “Inaccurate information”, and say what's wrong: the wrong edition, a bad cover image, a description from a different book. It goes to a moderator, who can edit the listing directly.

No. Toka is independent — no publisher holds a stake, sponsors a listing, or sees content before it's published. Where we're in a publisher's affiliate program, it's the same public program anyone can join, and it's disclosed on the resource page.

Not in the app stores yet. A Toka app for iPhone and Android is being built; the website works on a phone in the meantime.

A place for a parent to assign the day's schoolwork and chores to each child and see what actually got done — with a photo, a quiz or a simple tap as proof, depending on the task. It's available to signed-in families on the web today, and it's the heart of the mobile app being built.

The core stays free permanently: browsing, reviews, the planner, task and chore tracking, and community. A paid family plan is planned later for extras like transcripts, compliance reports and unlimited children — never for what's free today.

Not yet. A marketplace where teachers list their own courses is on the roadmap, with teachers keeping most of each sale and no listing fee. If you teach and want to hear when it opens, tell us.

Yes. Toka is in English for the US and the UK today, with prices, sellers and spelling following the country your family sets. Much of the curriculum families use in the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa is already in the catalogue.

Write to [email protected] — a moderation question, a listing to correct, an account to remove, or anything the answers above didn't cover. Replying to any email Toka sends you reaches the same place.