Thumbprint Roadmap

Thumbprint Educators,

On behalf of everyone on the Thumbprint team, we'd like to thank you for taking part in our first cohort of pilot schools this spring. It was an honor to work with so many talented, passionate teachers, and to look for ways to help you make your classrooms more productive.

Over the last few months we have received lots of feedback from each school about what you liked and what could be improved. The good news: everyone had pretty similar wish-lists for what we should do next or do better, and they matched very closely with our own internal roadmap.

What roadmap, you ask? The one presented below. These are the big projects we will be working on over the coming months, roughly in the order that we're planning to address them. We are always open to additional feedback and ideas, but for now, have a quick look at what we have planned. Hopefully most or all of the items on your personal wish list are covered here.

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.

Thanks again for participating in the pilot with us. We hope that you enjoyed this introduction to Thumbprint, and that we will continue working together in the future.

The Thumbprint Team

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