Activity Scheduling
A prospective user asked via email about creating a schedule in myhomeschoolplan.com and I thought the answer was worth sharing. (If you have tips on how you schedule activities please post in the comments.)
1. Generic Recurring Activities: There are activities where the description does not vary. An example would be “Reading for fun.” We create an activity called “Reading for fun”, make it a recurring activity Monday through Friday with an end date of the end of the quarter, and assign to all three kids.
2. Recurring Activities with Specific Descriptions: My wife creates a recurring activity for the quarter, for instance she will create an activity called “Life of Fred Math”, Monday through Friday. Then on Sunday night, she will go to the list for the week, and edit the description line for each day with the specific assignment, e.g. read chapter 1 (Monday), read chapter 2 (Tuesday) etc.
3. Specific Activities: On Sunday nights, she looks at the week and inputs any non-recurring activities. Perhaps we are going on a field trip, or there is a show on TV or a DVD she wants someone to watch.
We have found this to be a good method to make the most efficient use of our time. Anyone else have any tips?
Adding A New School Year
Have you been using MyHomeSchoolPlan.com since the spring? Getting ready to start a new school year?
Click on the School Years link and you can add the new school year. We’ve also added a ‘title’ so you can name the school year (we like to call it the 2009/10 school year for instance.)
Once you have added the school year and clicked save, you will see the ‘Edit Terms’ link, as well as ‘Add Existing Courses to School Year.’ The terms link will allow you to set up your calendar (quarters, semesters, etc.)
The courses link displays all of your courses from the previous year. Simply select the checkbox for any course you wish to add to this new school year. NOTE: You still need to enroll your students in the new courses, so after you have done this go to the enroll screen.
This is our first “new school year” so please let us know how it goes, and how we can make this better.
Here’s to a great new school year for you and your children, we hope in some small way we can aid you in having a terrific year.
PS and to new users who are using this for the first time, just go to the settings page and it will walk you through the set up process.
Starting a new school year
We are working on how users move from one school year to the next in myhomeschoolplan.com and would love your feedback. You can @ reply me on twitter, use the suggestion area, or the comments area in this blog post.
We want it to be super easy, and we want to remove clutter. In other words, we don’t want to automatically move all of your courses from the previous year. What are other key considerations you have for creating a new school year?
Suggestions
Just a note of thanks and encouragement to all of you. When you are logged in to myhomeschoolplan.com, there is a link at the upper right called suggestions. We use a service called uservoice and we are very happy with it.
You can add an idea, or vote on an existing idea. Currently, reading list has the most votes.
One request I have is if you could use your myhomeschoolplan user id or include an email address. Sometimes I like to get clarification on an idea and if you submit it anonymously, all I can do is comment on the idea and hope you come back and take a look (which is cool if you do.)
So again, thanks for using the suggestions area, keep those ideas come, we really do appreciate it.
MyHomeSchoolPlan update
Hi everyone. We just got back from two wonderful weeks out west that I’ll post about later but wanted to give an update on MyHomeSchoolPlan.
We have officially launched and left our Beta behind! In the same way that our Beta launch was a ’soft’ launch, so is this. We will do more of a push as August/September rolls around.
What does leaving Beta mean to our customers? For existing users, as a thank you to for trying us out and giving us such great feedback during the beta, the site will remain free to you! Thanks so much for giving us the confidence to keep this going and improve the site. At some point in the future we may add some major new feature/product that will be an additional charge, but the scheduler will remain free.
For new users, we have implemented a pricing plan based on feedback that we feel is a great value, that will allow us to continue to add features (while keeping the service easy to use) without making price a major issue to customers. On our pricing page you can see the pricing, but essentially we offer pricing based timeframes: monthly, quarterly, and annually. You can skip as much time as you like, i.e. put your account on hold, and all your data will be there when you come back.
Our pricing motto was “a latte a month” and we’ve held to that. If you pay by the month, it is a large latte, $4 a month. If you go with the annual plan, $30 a year, that breaks down to $2.50 a month, less than a latte!
We thank all our customers old and new and hope you find this a service of value. We have lots of plans that we’ll be posting about over the summer. Our next big step that we’re testing now, is the creation of a ‘new’ school year, so you can move your students into new courses and grade levels.
Book Reading Lists
We are going to implement a new feature soon to myhomeschoolplan.com. It’s the number one request on our suggestions page, Reading Lists. I’d like to start a discussion here on what that means to you all.
- Would you like one list total, or one for each child? (I’m thinking one for each child.)
- Have the list be text (like this bulleted list here) or actually link back to amazon.com
- Do you want to tag the books by subject or course? (I’m thinking for the reading lists, no, that’s not the purpose, but I could be wrong.)
- Do you want to use simply for books you’ve read, or do you want to treat like amazon’s wish list where you indicate, ‘I’d like to read’ or ‘I’ve read’?
- Lastly (and this would be a later phase) would you like to be able to share this list with others, and view others’ lists? That way, if you were wondering “what are other 8 year old girls reading” you could see. (and it would be up to you of course if you wanted to share that.)
You can email us or reply in the comments with your thoughts. Any and all responses are appreciated, you all help make this a better product.
New Feature – Drag Your Activities Where You Want Them!
Today, we’re excited to launch some new features that you’ve asked for, that we think will really aid in your daily usage.
So let’s tell a story. Jan creates a schedule this week for her son Jim. Jan wants to prioritize the list each day so Jim will know in what order to work on his activities. Jan holds her mouse over an activity (the cursor turns into a hand) and drags the activity in the proper order. She drags math to the top of the list and is ready to go.
- Drag activities in priority order simply by using your mouse.
Back to our story. At the end of the day, Jan sees that Jim has not finished his History reading. No problem, Jan thinks, I will just drag the history lesson on Tuesday to Wednesday.
- Drag activities to another day.
This isone of those little things that makes the experience for you that much better.
Other Features we’ve added to remind you about from the last couple weeks
- On the Schedule, there is a filter that allows you to switch your view from date driven to a course activity list.
- On the Schedule icons row, we now have a monthly view in addition to a weekly.
Thanks to you all for your contributions. We’ve got some great ideas coming down the road as we get closer to a full-launch. Stay tuned.
Updates and new features added to MyHomeSchoolPlan
Thanks again to all of your feedback we’ve added/updated MyHomeSchoolPlan to make it easier to use and more useful for you.
The first change we made was to take everything related to getting setup and place those links under a “Setup” icon in the upper navigation. This is a minor change but some people were confused with the setup icons being under Homeroom
On a more exciting note, we’ve added the ability to see activities by course on the Schedule page. You will now see a Courses Filter box on the schedule page. Simply choose a course and you can see the activities you’ve done for that course only. In addition, we’ve added a Month View to the schedule as an additional choice besides the Week View.
This is one of the advantages of having the product on the web. As we get feedback from you on ways big and small to make the product better, we can work on them right away.
Thanks as always for using the product and keep the feedback coming!
Tip of the day: Reports
We have rolled out some new features in the Reports area and I wanted to let you know about them today.
— First of all, we made the report dates more intuitive. Instead of always having to select date ranges, we are giving you suggestions like ’school year to date’ or ‘last quarter’. You can still customize your report dates by choosing customize in the drop down, but we think this is clearer and quicker.
— We are continuing to improve the aesthetic quality as well, including the print version of the reports. (We also made the print view of the schedule better.)
— For many people, hours are not as important as attendance, so we’ve added the attendance report. If you have a completed activity on a given day, the day is counted on the attendance report.
— Additional options were added both to the activity type, and courseware.
Some items coming up in our next iteration:
— Daily and monthly schedule view
— Make it easier to move activities around
We’re very excited about the direction the product is headed and couldn’t do it without you.
Update on our Myhomeschoolplan.com
I want to thank everyone again for really helping us improve the product over the last 2 weeks. With zero marketing, just twitter and a homeschool forum, we’ve hit 150 homeschooling families. And many have said they got the link from someone else so again, thanks! We are intentionally taking the marketing of this slowly as we wanted to get feedback and continue to improve the product before going to full launch.
The suggestions area is the most used area, with the forums and support emails trailing behind. Which is great, we love to hear your ideas and are implementing several as we speak.
So please continue to let others know about the product if you like, and let me know what you don’t like so we can try and fix it.