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?
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.
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.
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.