Future improvements

Just 2 people have taken on a huge task - well done Lesley Goddard and Simon Booth. When we started we wanted, and still want to produce an app to be proud of, but we’ve realised we could be working at this for another 9 years, so we’ve produced a minimal viable product.

  • the app works,

  • the teacher can better teach,

  • the learners can better learn,

  • we can prove (with your help, dear reader) that this method of teaching and learning works and is worthy of more investment.

There are many things that could be better and we’ve included some of these below, please do let us know where our priorities should lie - you can highlight the text and leave us a message - and then we can prioritise where our future efforts will go. Here’s the list:

Be able to see recent assessment outcomes when assessing a question on a layer

This will help a teacher decide whether to give the feedback on attempt or the best learned later assessment outcome.

1st tap of Edit Taught verifies teaching of first topic, 2nd tap, the second topic etc

So the teacher can edit the first topic taught and keep the second topic for the next lesson (the teacher ran out of time).

Use timely practice to train teachers to use timely practice

This is close to ready

Allow the teacher to see when a layer has all its pre requisites from other topics

… and possibly what the pre requisites are

Improve auto pre assess process

Sometimes a third round of trial and improvement would be helpful.

It may be, we need to widen the range of difficulty which Level for Learner covers

It certainly would be good, if a teacher could pre-assess a topic again, for some learners or the whole class, without the app throwing away the existing data!

Automatically swap between scaffold pair layers

e.g. layer 3 is a scaffold to layer 4. We might automatically be able to

  • once the learner has mastered layer 3: stop asking questions on layer 3 and begin to ask questions on layer 4, as if it has just been taught

  • allow the teacher to teach layer 3/4 and then the app finds out who can answer questions on layer 4 without the need for feedback and who is best on answering questions on layer 3