Goals!

After several weeks of wrangling and a couple of weeks of solid work, we're wrapping up our first round of lessons built from existing teacher content this week. It's been an interesting process, taking materials that are usually delivered on paper and converting them into an interactive tablet experience. The transcription part is easy - even typing materials out by hand doesn't take very long, and copy/paste takes even less time. The interesting part is coming to terms with the ways in which the technology makes you think about the content differently. A couple of examples:

1. If students can move at their own pace, and storage is free, you quickly realize that you want MORE - more videos, more references, more quizzes. Different students will be reached by different presentation styles, and if they don't have to wait for the class to catch up, you want them to keep going. We spent a lot of time adding, fleshing out, and finding several different ways to communicate the same idea.

2. Being able to see a lesson as a playlist and flip through it makes you think hard about when to switch learning styles. The flow of a lesson becomes an interesting challenge, bouncing between Watch, Read, and Do in order to engage different parts of the brain and combat fatigue. Everyone, adults included, needs some variety in their activities in order to stay focused, and Thumbprint's lesson layout turns out to be a very effective way of highlighting areas where one form of engagement is being leaned on too heavily.

I'm very proud of the team's work on these lessons, and I look forward to a lively discussion with the teachers about how the materials can be further improved.