Introducing Tip of the Day
I created a new category that I’ll store these tips under, Tip of the Day. Of course that may be an overly optimistic category but tip-of-the-every-couple-days just doesn’t sound as good.
Today, I’ll give a brief overview of how to contact us and one other product tip. First of all you can always post a comment in the blog. We moderate comments so they may not show up instantaneously but we update as quickly as we can. You can also email us at support @ myhomeschoolplan.com.
Once logged in, in the upper right there are two links, one for forums and one for suggestions. The forum is a great place to post bugs, questions, or just general opinions. In addition to the blog we’ll post announcements in one of the forums.
If you have an idea or suggestion for improvement, use the suggestion link. We’re utilizing the terrific uservoice.com service for this and so far the results have been great.
So beyond how to contact us, let’s talk about Subjects. Subjects are the highest level of curriculum, such as Math, Science, Foreign Language, etc. (And, thanks to one of your suggestions, we added a couple new ones as well as an ‘Other’.) Within our Setup page, you have the ability to create Courses. Courses are a subset of Subjects. For example, under the Subject Math, you may have a Course called Algebra, Logic, Fractions, etc.
When you create a course, we require you to add a grade level. This allows you to view reports by grade level so you can see how many hours your student has spent on various grade levels, e.g. a gifted student spends a semester divided between 6th, 7th, and 9th grade level courses.
However, and again, this is based on your feedback, we’ve made a tweak that we think many of you will really like (in fact, we’ve already received positive responses.) Not everyone wants or cares about the grade level reporting. Many parents care most about getting things set up quickly so they can spend time teaching. So we created a grade level called Multi-grade. This allows you to create a course, then later assign an activity easily to many students without having to recreate the activity multiple times.
We hope little touches like this will make this an enjoyable application, and enjoyable experience for you.
Day two update
We had a great day in terms of all of you. You are using the suggestion page for ideas which is great, and more of you signed up. We did have some issues today and we are committed to letting you know about them on this blog.
We had two system outages today where you couldn’t log in to the site. We did some performance tuning and things are good again, but we are monitoring the system closely, and may close the system to do some maintenance this weekend. We recognize your time is valuable, and nothing hampers your experience like system outages. I apologize for this and will be as open about these things so you all know what is going on. This is a BETA and we know there will be bumps, but just because we are in BETA doesn’t mean we don’t take these things seriously.
One other thing, and we’ve had this planned all along, is that at some point we will close the BETA to new users, for a period of time to take your feedback and add some new features. We just didn’t realize how quickly we would get to that number with the great response from all of you.
On a positive note, we have incorporated 5-10 suggestions for improvements from all of you already (albeit small ones) and continue to tweak the performance tuning.
As always, I end this update with a thank you to all of you.
Day one of launch
Wow. And thank you. And wow again. The response today (1/7/09) has been amazing. In the first 2 hours we had twenty people signing up. But what has been the greatest part is how terrific you all have been. Within the first hour I was getting emails of encouragement, very constructive critiques and wishlists, and people were using our suggestions page (powered by uservoice, a great service.) What a wonderful niche to be working in with people as kind and encouraging as all of you.
Here’s the assessment of today, Clint Eastwood, spaghetti western-style:
The good: We had more people sign-up than we imagined. I’m not talking thousands or anything, but with no marketing, no advertising, just a blog post, twitter, and a couple forums, we got a great response and as of 3:00am the number keeps growing. The suggestions page has been used and people are emailing support, we even had people comment on this blog which is fantastic. I am proud that we tackled a couple major bugs that came up, and that we knocked out 4 requests by people today, ways to make the tool easier to use.
The bad: The forums don’t seem to be used, and I imagine it’s because it is easier to email or use the suggestion page. So I’m not surprised, and it is just day 1, but it validates what I’ve been thinking, forums are an area ripe for innovation and improvement. And, while I know it’s in BETA and it was our first day, it’s always disappointing to have bugs.
The ugly: The sign-up was down for a while. The great thing is the people who had a problem emailed or commented on the blog, and they stuck with us and signed up once it was working. That was it for ugly, it was a fun day.
I’m going to try to post several times a week with status updates, feature comments, or explanations about the product if I am seeing consistent feedback or questions.
Thanks again to everyone.
Announcing the launch of MyHomeSchoolPlan.com
I am thrilled to announced the beta launch of our homeschool scheduling application, MyHomeSchoolPlan.com. I am most thrilled to start getting feedback from all of you on how to make this a product that you are as passionate about as I am.
What is MyHomeSchoolPlan.com. Simply put, it is a web application that allows you to create, record, and review your homeschool activities quickly and easily. We want you to spend time with your kids, not your computer, so our focus has been on quick and easy setup. Create your courses, enroll your students in the courses and you are ready to create this week’s schedule. Are you someone who prepares your schedule a month in advance? Terrific, we have recurring activities and easy input to build your schedule as far out as you like. Or are you someone who creates your schedule the night before (like at our house, ahem)? No problem, we make it easy to enter tomorrow’s activities before you drop off to sleep.
Field trips, music, practice, assignments and tests all have a place in MyHomeSchoolPlan.com. Then, when you want to check on the the progress of your students, you can run a report to check on hours, or create a report card.
You can go to MyHomeSchoolPlan.com and sign-up for an account, it’s free. We’ll keep you updated on the blog about progress, new features, even issues that arise (and issues always arise in a beta). We have forums and suggestion areas to give you places to give us feedback too. And, of course, you can comment on this blog or follow on twitter.
Give it a try and please send us feedback, positive or negative, we have big plans for the product, but they always be centered on giving you time to spend with your kids.
Homeschool Plan Update – Coming soon
This fall has been incredibly busy for TexoDev and for Gomoll Research + Design (where I work as a User Experience Director). In the current economy, that is a terrific problem to have. The downside to the pace is that MyHomeschoolPlan’s launch has been delayed, but rest assured we are excited about our upcoming launch. We had planned on a traditional “first semester” launch. But we are focused on launching with a user-friendly experience and won’t launch until we have that ready.
This month we are making great strides and our plan is to beta launch in January, the 2nd semester. We’ll launch with a free trial period during our beta, after that you’ll have a 30-day free trial period.
During the beta we’ll give you the ability to set up your school, students, and courses. From there you can create your daily / weekly schedules for your kids. You’ll also have reporting available to you such as a breakdown of time spent on courses, as well as a report card.
We’ve got some great plans for down the road, but our focus will always be easily creating your schedule for you and your kids so you can spend time with your kids not your computer.
Over the next couple weeks we’ll dive into features and functions on the blog.
Why use a Home School Scheduler – let me count the ways
Note: My wife will occasionally guest post (hopefully frequently as she has a great perspective on homeschooling.) This is her first post.
Why do we use a schedule? For myself and all three kids the answer is different.
For me, I find that if I don’t write down on paper the things that I want to do, they just spin in my head (I’m sure no other moms have this problem). I don’t want to forget anything, so I keep thinking about it. If I write it down, I don’t have to spend energy thinking about it and I remember what it was that I wanted to do. Sometimes I have a great idea about something that I want to try but the kids, the laundry or dinner interrupt my thoughts. Then later I remember that I forgot to do my "great" idea.
Our oldest son is able to work independently on most of his homeschooling. He loves to read and takes everything in best when left to do it himself. If I give him a schedule, he knows what he needs to do and together we can plan how he spends his time. A schedule also prevents him from "forgetting" and running out of time for the subjects that are not his favorites (but that I think are important!).
Son number two likes to know exactly what is going to happen during the day. Even during summer, he asks what our schedule is. He wants to know what work he has to do and where we are going a week at a time. He desires a sense of "order". He definitely feels a sense of accomplishment when he is able to check things off as done. He is more focused when he has a schedule to guide him.
Our youngest (daughter) likes to know what she is going to do each day, but she gets easily overwhelmed if it looks like too much. She would prefer to know only what is happening today and not what is happening all week. Her personality is much more relaxed and she focuses on what she wants to do. A schedule helps her remember that she has to do math even if she doesn’t really like it.
We use a schedule for each child, but for different reasons. I like to be able to customize our schedule to each child based upon their personality.
The myhomeschoolplan.com site
We’ve received positive feedback about our site so far, and we’re hoping for even better feedback about the product once we release it. Last post I talked about how to sign-up for updates on the blog via RSS feeds or email. And I’ve pointed out how to follow homeschoolplan on Twitter.
Today I want to briefly let you know how we hope to provide you feedback and listen to your feedback on our site when the product launches. We will of course be monitoring Twitter. But we want you to have a voice on the site too. So we’ve got a link at the top called ‘Forums‘. It’s empty now, but we’ll add forum topics where we’ll post items such as future releases, bugs we’re fixing (hopefully this will be a low posted forum topic), and how-to’s (another hopefully low posted topic); we’ll also have a HELP area for you to post your questions as well.
We are also trying out uservoice. This tool is a cool voting style application that allows you the user to post ideas for new features and then allows all users to vote for their favorites. Aside from homeschool requests like "come babysit my kids", we plan on using this tool to help drive some of our future feature release decisions.
We look forward to the multiple ways that we’ll be hearing from, and speaking with, you.
myhomeschoolplan.com "spend time with your kids, not your computer."
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Spend time with your kids, not your computer
That’s what we set out to do for ourselves in launching myhomeschoolplan.com, spend more time with our kids, less time on the computer staying organized.
My wife and I started homeschooling last summer. Well really, my wife does 99% of the work, I happen to work out of my home office, so I’m around. But I digress. Last summer, Jenn and I were scrambling all over the Internet and we were amazed at all the help that there was available in getting started with homeschooling. Lots of forums. Tons of blogs. Loads of website recommendations. And curriculum planning galore. We literally were overwhelmed with options. Nevertheless, we waded through the options for our three kids (Saxon Math or Singapore, Classical Schooling or Unschooling, online or books, etc.).
But one area of the homeschool journey didn’t offer as many choices as we liked. The day to day managing of our school. The setting up of our day or week (depending on the child, two liked planning by week, our youngest liked planning day by day). And then recording the activities when they were done.
There were a small handful of options, a couple that were CD downloads, and a couple that were online; but none really were what we were looking for. We wanted easy and intuitive, we didn’t want to have to fight the software to get what we wanted.
Eureka! We decided that we were going to build a web-based, easy to use application to create our homeschool schedule and record our activities. And we were on our way. We think there’s plenty of room in this sandbox and will never bash the other sites, and hope that a rising tide raises all ships as it were.
So the company I co-founded with Dave Reid, TexoDev, began work on the product, and we are going to launch this August. This blog will hopefully get the word out for anyone who is interested in using our application, for free! We are going to offer this first semester for free to entice as many of you as possible to use our humble little application and tell us what you think, and help us make it better for you.
We have big plans but always want to focus first on the user experience, making it as pleasing and elegant as possible. So subscribe to the blog via RSS or email (see the icons at the upper right of this page and click on whichever you like). Follow us on Twitter (at the right). And comment at Twitter or in the blog to let us know what you think.
Future blog posts will delve into feature/functions of this first release, and future releases, as well as other homeschooling topics of interest. You can hop over to our development blog at TexoDev to follow our blogging about the technical side (we’re using Ruby to write the application if you’re interested.) We will be starting those topics next week.
So thanks for following and please let us know what you’d like to see in Your Homeschool Plan.
myhomeschoolplan.com “spend time with your kids, not your computer”