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.
Timelines
One of the things we do at homeschool that I love is our history lessons. Jennifer has done an amazing job of balancing the depth levels across our three kids’ ages while yet having them go through the same time period together.
To that end, as we begin a new era, she pulls out a lengthy roll of paper (picture someone rolling out a red carpet and you get the idea). Each child gets a marker and can put in the dates/events of importance. This allows our oldest to go in depth and focus on dates of battles (his interest) while my daughter can focus on inventions.
The other thing that comes out of this is the layering of what was going on around the world. Many books do this in their timelines now as well, but with our size paper roll, we can really play with this, so we can see what is going on in Roman times in Western Europe, North America, and China, for example, in one view.
Give it a try, it’s a low cost way to get your children working together yet at their own pace/depth.
Review: Life of Fred Math books
My wife has graciously agreed to guest post again, and she writes this week on the “Life of Fred” math series. She writes:
All three of our children weren’t as fond of math as other subjects. That doesn’t mean that they were not good at it, but they did not think they were. They would much rather have read a book than do math, actually they would rather have done anything than math.
I heard a recommendation that the Life of Fred math books were good for children who love to read and dislike math. So I figured that I would try them. After all, what we were doing wasn’t working at all. When I first picked up one of the books, I was surprised because it didn’t look like a math book. Stanley F. Schmidt, the author of the books, uses humor and fun pictures throughout the books. Each book is divided into chapters (lessons) that tell Fred’s story and how Fred needs mathematics. In the early books, there are problems that they need to complete in every chapter and at the end of every four or five chapters they have to pass a bridge to move on. In later books, they have “cities” to work through at the end of each chapter in addition to the problems in the chapter. Each concept is clear and easy for my children to understand on their own without any help. The books also explain the why behind many of the math concepts being taught. So my children have a great grasp of the material when they are finished.
When I handed my children their first Life of Fred book, they actually asked me if they could do another chapter. More math? What had happened to my children? I wasn’t sure what to think, but I told them yes! Now as they are doing math, I hear them laughing. And they call me over to them, not because they need help, but because they want to share something funny that Fred did or said with me. We have completed Fractions, Decimals and Percents, and Beginning Algebra. We are getting ready for Advanced Algebra. After that we have Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus, and Statistics. So we won’t run out of math anytime soon! Sometimes, they even choose Life of Fred over a good book.
Website for Life of Fred math books: http://www.stanleyschmidt.com/FredGauss/index2.html
Printing your schedule
Over the last several days we added some new tweaks to make printing the schedule off a better experience for you. Both of these were based on ideas from our users contributing to the ideas area of the site.
Someone asked that we ‘uncheck’ the complete box for the print view, since the complete font for activities was difficult to read. This is a great example of understanding the user’s underlying problem or goal versus necessarily taking the suggested solution. The user pointed out a problem we were unaware of, that the complete view for activities was not as readable. Our solution then was not to uncheck the complete box, but to change the font for the print view so that it looks better and is easier to use.
Similarly, someone asked to remove the weekend days from the print view. I replied back commenting on if the intent is really to not print days with no activities. Someone else replied in the affirmative and it made sense to us so now when you print off your schedule, days with no activities will not print.
Little by little we are making improvements big and small.
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.
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.