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homeschool

An app for homeschool planning

Setup

Python

Create a virtual environment.

$ python -m venv venv

Activate the virtual environment.

$ source venv/bin/activate

Install developer and application packages.

Note: pygraphviz requires graphviz so you may need to install that first. On homebrew on a Mac, you can install that tool with brew install graphviz.

PostgreSQL can be installed with brew install postgresql.

$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

I had some trouble getting pygraphviz to compile and needed to include some library paths. Here's what I needed locally.

CFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/Cellar/graphviz/5.0.0/include" \
LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/Cellar/graphviz/5.0.0/lib" \
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt -r requirements.txt

JavaScript

Node.js is required.

brew install nodejs

Install JS packages to get Tailwind CSS.

npm i

Deployment

Install Heroku CLI tools.

Bootstrap the local database.

$ ./manage.py migrate

Create a superuser account.

$ ./manage.py createsuperuser

Start the local web server.

$ make

Docker Compose

Tricky problems require better debugging tools. This command will get db data from Heroku to inspect issues:

$ heroku pg:pull HEROKU_PG_NAME postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/mylocaldb --app APP

Market Research

This is my analysis of the market to assess the features and positioning of what is available.

Research plan: Sign up for a service trial to test out the account. Share findings on forums to solicit feedback.

Measurement criteria:

  • Price
  • Features
  • Quality

Well Trained Mind reference analysis

Product Matrix

Product Business Model Price Reviewed
CM Organizer Freemium $7.95 / month 2/1/21
Google Classroom Free $0 3/12/21
Homeschool Manager Subscription $5.99 / month 3/13/21
Homeschool Minder Subscription $4.99 / month 5/3/21
Homeschool Planet Subscription $7.95 / month 5/20/21

Charlotte Mason Organizer

https://simplycharlottemason.com/store/cm-organizer/

  • Pitch: Homeschool organizer for those using the Charlotte Mason method.
  • The service seems centered around picking specific books and adding them to the schedule. Books are considered "resources."
  • Offers Progress, Attendance, and Bibliography reports
  • Share resources with other CM organizer users (paid feature)
  • Fetches book information by ISBN
  • Resources are attached to "subjects."
  • Resources are broken up on the scheduler by "divisions" (e.g., chapters) and called "assignments."
  • Assignments can be partially completed and marked as "worked on."
  • Filters on daily view.

Forum topics:

Google Classroom

https://classroom.google.com/h

  • For Teachers, Students, and Parents/Guardians
  • Class announcements
  • Respond to student posts
  • Integration with Google Drive
  • Google Worksplace for Education for extra privacy controls
  • Define "Rubrics" to tell students how work is graded
  • Students see their grades and can submit assignments
  • Private messages between teachers and students
  • Scheduling abilities of Google Calendar
  • Class questions

Forum topics:

Homeschool Manager

https://homeschoolmanager.com/

  • Pricing: $5.99 / month OR $49 / year
  • Starts with student setup
  • Video help for onboarding
  • School Year is bound to student (behaves like Grade Level)
  • Drag and drop functionality for task management
  • Quick add task feature
  • Grade stuff, different task types, grade calculator, grade scales
  • Define types of tasks, task weighting for grades
  • Volunteer hours tracking
  • Book list tracking
  • Dashboard to track what's overdue (necessary because tasks are pinned to dates)
  • Report cards and past history
  • Transcripts
  • Attendance and time tracking
  • Family logins to allow others to login in with a restricted account
  • Click tracking with clicky.com
  • JavaScript (Angular?) app so most of the links don't show where a user is about to go.
  • Missing many of the empty states on pages

Onboarding

  • Simple form to sign up. No credit card.
  • Create school and student. On first page, sticky footer with "Create my school" CTA. Add multiple students in first step.
  • Land on students page with warnings that each student doesn't have a school year set up.
  • Multi-step wizard to create a school year for a student.
    • School Year == Grade Level
    • Subject == Course, grading and scheduling can be done off platform. Quite quick to add multiple subjects for a school year. Subject don't default to running on certain days. Must always pick. Subjects can run on a monthly schedule.
    • Step 3 is the scheduling for each Subject
  • Received a Welcome Email that includes links to help, link to Facebook group, share link
  • Day +1, start of a drip campaign explaining the service.

UI

Top nav:

  • Left side: Dashboard and Students
  • Right side: Help, link to Vimeo video help, account drop down

Dashboard:

  • Low information initially
  • Links to student pages of various types

Accounts section:

  • Divided into tabs to separate topics.
  • School info, contact info, subscription, holidays, tasks & weighting, grading scales, logins

Student index:

  • I can't quickly look at the week view for both of my students at the same time.

Student section:

  • Schedule
    • Task entry doesn't work if school year starts in the future. This is not obvious.
    • Tasks are draggable to different days. Tasks dragged to "Next week" move to the same day on the following week.
  • Gradebook
  • Book list
  • Documents
    • This is a section for generating documents. These are reports in formats like PDF and XSLX
  • Admin
    • School years
    • Grade scale
    • Volunteer hours - quick add form

Forum topics: Nothing found.

Homeschool Minder

https://www.homeschoolminder.com/

  • From 2012
  • Pricing $4.99 / month OR $39.99 / year (free trial, length not on homepage)
  • Broken blog
  • Primary features from intro video
    • Scheduler (Calendar)
    • Gradebook
    • Lesson plans
    • Skill tracking
    • Student records
    • Reports
  • Grade scales - users can define the numbers and symbols used
  • Calendar has some pretty deep recurrence features
  • Lesson plans
    • a way to group and sub-divide activities within a course.
    • Tied to a course and term (i.e., intended to be time bound)
  • Skills
    • Skills track activities within a course too, but are not time bound
    • A group of Skills is a Standard
  • Student Information
    • Tracks a bunch of personal identification (:grimacing:)
    • Can add aribtrary custom fields and values
    • Tracks contact information
    • Tracks standardized test scores
    • Tracks "Readings" aka a book list
    • Tracks community service information
  • Reports
    • Lots of different report choices
    • All seem to be generated PDFs
  • Student Logins
    • Students get a mostly read only view, but can complete tasks.
  • School Years require terms and courses must be added to a term.
  • Students are added to courses via a Registration
    • It looks like a registration is needed per course (whoa, heavy).
  • The service can track any random events on the calendar.
  • Assignments have customizable categories.
  • Sign up experience
    • Sign up directly from landing page
    • Dumps into an intro flow popover
      • Step 1: Long (7 minute) intro video
      • Step 2: Asks for a bunch of teacher settings
      • Step 3: Sets up a year and some terms based on pre-configured dates
      • Step 4: Create student
      • Step 5: Create courses
      • Step 6: Weird old message about getting docs together and a "beta" (what? This isn't 2012 any more)
      • Land on an empty calendar after filling out details
    • Received welcome email
    • Discovered from settings page that the trial is 30 days long

UI

  • Main section: Student Planner
    • Calendar
      • One student at a time
      • Add items from the calendar
      • Highly interactive
      • Week view expands into hourly view
    • Skills
      • A bit confusing to add a standard, then add a skill.
  • Only other tab: "Resources" - unclickable and "coming soon"
  • Secondary tabs
    • Settings
    • Help - links out to /docs
    • Log out

Forum topics:

Homeschool Planet

https://homeschoolplanet.com/

"Synchronize your home, school, and work into a single place"

  • Landing page
    • Email list capture
  • Pricing
    • 30 day trial
    • $69.95 / year
    • $7.95 / month
  • Social Media
    • Heavy activity on Facebook (at least daily)
    • Pinterest
    • YouTube to host help docs
    • Instagram
    • Blog (infrequent posts - handful per year, guest posts)
  • Marketplace
    • Other vendors provide lesson plans
  • Features
    • Daily digest email
    • Text messaging
    • Widgets with the calendar
    • Assignment == School Desk Task
    • Grades have different types and calculations
    • Tracks attendance
    • Tracks resources
    • Profiles (pictures, emails for sending digests, phone number for text messages)
    • Lookup widget (embedded search of other services)
  • Testimonials
    • User reviews (but they are old! 2017!)
    • Featured reviews (appear "fresh" from 2019, but are recycled old reviews), seems shady
    • Lots of undated testimonials (current user reviews?)

Forum topics:

Homeschool Reporting Online

https://homeschoolreporting.com/

Forum topics:

Nothing found.

Homeschool Skedtrack

http://www.homeschoolskedtrack.com/HomeSchool/displayLogin.do

Forum topics:

Homeschool Tracker

https://www.homeschooltracker.com/

Forum topics:

Homeschooling Records

https://homeschoolingrecords.com/default.aspx

Forum topics:

Nothing found.

Lessontrek

https://lessontrek.com/

Forum topics:

My School Year

https://www.myschoolyear.com/

Forum topics:

Nothing found.

Scholaric

https://www.scholaric.com/marketing

Forum topics:

Well Planned Gal

https://shop.wellplannedgal.com/index.php/shop/well-planned-day-online.html

Audience

Things to try:

  • Google Adwords keyword planner
  • followerwonk.com
  • Topsy Analytics to check social mentions?
  • Ahrefs Site Explorer to see referral traffic for other sites
  • BuzzSumo for Twitter analysis
  • Homeschool magazines? Is that a thing?
  • Amazon reviews of homeschool stuff
  • Reddit has a homeschool subreddit
  • Popular homeschool blogs to contact?
  • Homeschool podcasts?
  • Monthly webinars?

Future

  • Dunning - Don't make customer sign in to update card info
  • Dunning - Don't email until the card has actually failed (wait until 3rd reattempt or 5 days)
  • Dunning - Email multiple times. It's ok. People miss stuff.
  • Churn Buster if crazy popular by some remote chance
  • Make Annual <-> Monthly up/downgrade not hard

Persona

This is an exercise to build a reasonable persona of the ideal customer for School Desk as suggested in SaaS Marketing Essentials.

Hannah Homeschooler:

  • Hannah is a 30 - 45 year old woman.
  • She is educated and a self-starter (fiercely independent).
  • Hannah has two children.
  • Hannah lives in a suburban area or small to mid-size city.
  • Her time is constrained while balancing home obligations with child education.
  • Hannah has a fondness for paper for keeping records. Before finding School Desk, she was starting to hit the limits of her process and was looking for a way to save time.
  • Hannah wants full control of what she teaches her children, but would like some tools that can take out the drudgery of building weekly schedules for school.
  • After using School Desk, Hannah benefits from the automatically generated schedules that show her material in a timeframe that fits the constraints that she specified to School Desk.
  • School Desk makes it painless to stay on top of homeschool so that she focus her attention on other parts of her life.

Product Position

What's the point? Why would Hannah want to use School Desk? Is it control? Is it time saving?

What is the benefit?

  • "Take Control of Your Homeschool Plan"
  • "Save Time Building Your Homeschool Plan"
  • "Focus on Your School, Let Us Handle the Schedule"
  • Stop swimming in spreadsheets
  • Not an airplane cockpit

Customer answer: The key benefit is simplicity.

About

An app for homeschool planning

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License

MIT license
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  • Python 71.4%
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  • JavaScript 0.4%
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  • Dockerfile 0.1%
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