Frequently asked questions

Toka is a free catalog of the books, videos, courses and DVDs families actually teach with — reviewed by the parents, teachers and students who have used them.

The idea is simple: everything you'd otherwise piece together from a dozen forum threads, gathered on one page. Honest ratings, what age it suited, how much prep it took, whether it got finished. Browse the catalog and see what's there.

Homeschool parents choosing curriculum, teachers hunting for something that works, and older students researching their own courses.

You don't have to follow a particular program to get something out of it. The catalog covers Classical Conversations, Abeka, BJU Press, Sonlight, The Good and the Beautiful, Memoria Press and plenty more — alongside ordinary books and videos that were never sold as curriculum and teach beautifully anyway.

Yes, and not in the trial-period sense. Browsing, searching, reading reviews, writing your own and submitting a resource are free, and they are staying that way — a catalog only gets good if the people using it can add to it.

What pays for it is affiliate commissions when someone buys through a seller link, at no extra cost to you.

Not to look around. Browsing, reading reviews and comparing prices need nothing at all.

You'll 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 on purpose — it's what keeps a rating worth reading. Creating one takes about a minute.

Start with something you already own. Search for a curriculum or book that's been on your shelf a while and read what other families made of it.

Then write your own review of it. The resources you've already lived with are the ones you can genuinely help someone else with, and they're worth more here than an opinion about something you're still considering. If what 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.

Then you fix whatever came through wrong, which is usually something: automatic lookups are good at titles and bad at knowing which edition you meant. A moderator reads it before it goes live.

The step-by-step guide walks through each field.

Anything a family learns from: books and curriculum, videos, online courses, DVDs. It doesn't have to be homeschool-specific, and it doesn't have to be in print — plenty of the best things families use were never marketed at them.

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 publishes, so it isn't instant — usually a few days.

That's the trade for a catalog that isn't full of junk, and we'd rather be slow than let the first bit of spam set the tone. If something has been waiting much longer than that, write to us and we'll go and find it.

Open the resource's page and choose Write a review. Give it a star rating, then say what worked and what didn't.

The specifics are the useful part: how old your learners were, how much prep it took you on a Sunday night, where it lost them, whether you'd reach for it again. “We loved it” tells the next family nothing. “Great for a chatty 7-year-old, far too much writing for my 9-year-old” tells them everything.

The step-by-step guide covers the form in detail.

Not from the site yet. You get one review per resource, and once it's in 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 sort it out. Editing your own is on the list.

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 earning its place long after you wrote it.

Nobody can buy a position, and publishers don't get a say.

Yes — and we'd rather say so than have you wonder. Some seller links are affiliate links: buy through one and we earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

It's what keeps the lights on — the servers, the database, the price checks — and why browsing, reviewing and submitting stay free. What it doesn't buy is a better spot: the price panel is sorted by price, not by who pays us.

Every review, resource, profile photo and display name has a Report control. Pick a reason, add detail if it helps, and it lands straight in a moderator's queue.

You're never shown to the person you reported.

The step-by-step guide shows where to find it.

Resources are tagged with age and grade ranges, and you can browse by them directly.

A family can set a maximum age level so older material is filtered out, and a child profile in the planner only sees the resources you've made visible to it. Uploaded images and text are screened for offensive content before they publish.

None of that replaces knowing your own children — but it does mean you're not the only thing standing between them and a bad listing.

A small team of Toka moderators — real people, not an automated filter left to its own devices.

Automated checks screen images and text first, because they're fast and tireless. A person makes every publish, reject and takedown decision.

What your account needs to work, and what tells us which pages are actually useful. We don't sell any of it, and there's no advertising network riding along collecting its own copy.

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'd like the reviews you've published taken down too — some people would rather leave them up for the next family, so we don't assume either way.

Toka checks the sellers that carry a title — Amazon, Rainbow Resource, ChristianBook, AbeBooks, ThriftBooks, eBay, the publisher's own store, 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, so the panel fills in as answers come back instead of holding the page up.

Either none of the sellers we check has that title right now, or we haven't managed to match it to their listing yet. Matching is fiddlier than it sounds — editions, bundles and teacher's guides all look much alike from the outside.

Prices are also cached for about an hour, so one that moved 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 — and defaults to the United States until you've set one.

Sellers can't pay to be listed or to be ranked higher. If there's somewhere you buy from that we're missing, tell us and we'll look at adding it.

Use Report this resource on the page, choose “Inaccurate information”, and say what's wrong: the wrong edition, a bad cover image, a description that clearly belongs to a different book.

It goes to a moderator, who can edit the listing directly. These are some of the most useful reports we get — a wrong edition can cost somebody real money.

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. A bad review of a program we earn from stays up exactly as written.

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

A place for a parent to assign the day's schoolwork and chores to each child, and then 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 planner guides show how to set up a day.

The core stays free permanently: browsing, reviews, the planner, task and chore tracking, and community. That isn't an introductory period — it's the whole point.

A paid family plan is planned later for extras like transcripts, compliance reports and unlimited children. Never for something that'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 — knowing who's waiting is genuinely how we decide what to build next.

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 catalog, so you're unlikely to be starting from an empty page.

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, and a real person reads it.