Every development team has a Roadmap - the plan for what's being built next, and in what order. Often it lives only in one person's head; sometimes it's a big graphic that teams meet and fight over for months. Wherever it lives, it lives.
Why do we keep these things a secret? Because they're contentious, because they're always changing, because we're not sure we can get it all done, because we don't want to tip our hand.
Baloney to all that.
Here's the Thumbprint Roadmap as it stands on Friday June 6, 2014. It may change tomorrow. We may add, delete, or move things around. We may not even finish it all. But for today, at least, it's a plan.
1. Chat
What is it?: A new Thumbprint tab that allows teachers to create chatrooms for each of their classes, and for teachers and students to easily share content with each other by dragging it into and out of the chat window.
2. Worksheets 2.0
What is it?: An improved version of student worksheets that are easy to create and use. Students answer questions by either typing or drawing their answer in the spaces provided. Teachers are notified when a worksheet is complete, and can go in to provide marks and comments. Students are notified and can review teacher feedback, and marks are automatically added to Thumbprint Reports.
3. Drag and Match Quiz Type
What is it?: A new type of quiz where students drag one object (text or image) onto another. Can be used in a variety of situations, like placing State names on a map, completing a puzzle, or associated synonyms, homonyms or antonyms. Students are marked automatically based on the number of attempts required to get the correct answers.
4. Reports 2.0
What is it?: A revamp of the Reporting tool to add some highly-requested features, including: a new Report type that shows all activity for a selected Student; date range and timeframe selectors for all reports, improved color palette for easier reading of data.
5. Math Content Object
What is it?: A basic spreadsheet, equation editor and graphing tool to allow students to demonstrate knowledge of mathematical concepts. Teachers provide, by creating or importing, a template of the assignment, students interact with it, and the marking and feedback process work like they do for Worksheets.
6. Multiple Choice 2.0
What is it?: Adding some highly-requested features to Multiple Choice quizzes, including: adding images to the quiz question block, expanding the maximum question length, adding auto-advance to answered questions on iOS.
7. Enhanced Search/Featured Tab
What is it?: Some new ways to find great content that other users have created. Includes: a new Featured tab with a curated list of great nodes, authors and collections; refinements to Search that return more relevant and detailed results; incorporation of up- and downvotes into ranking.
8. Nodes 2.0
What is it?: Adding frequently-requested features to Nodes, including: Flagging inappropriate nodes, "Find this author" option, "Revert back to Alias" option for Cloned nodes, user-selected checkbox to mark content objects as Done, progress bar for Nodes indicating percentage of contents marked as Done; upvote and downvote options for rating the node; "Private" flag to hide nodes from Search and Explore view.
9. Dynamic Skins
What is it?: A revamp of the look-and-feel portion of the app, allowing it to look good on a wider range of devices and appeal to a broader range of users. Includes: dynamic screen detection, user-selected palette and layout, new icon designs, support for visually impaired users.
If you've made it this far, you probably have an opinion, so I encourage you to leave a comment. Thanks for reading.