Things have been busy since last school year wrapped in June. We spent the first half of the summer working on our admin interface (that's a whole post of its own). Once we got that to a stable place, we switched back to working on the Unrulr app in mid-August. And we've made a few improvements since then.
The broad spectrum of learning happening daily is truly humbling, running the gamut from quarantine gardens to guitar practice. And learners have been generally pretty good at recognizing which goals/skills apply to their work. Planting ‘uala (sweet potato)? That's clearly Shelter-in-place: Nature. Practicing the A-minor pentatonic scale? Technique: Left-Hand.
But sometimes teachers see connections that learners miss. That quarantine garden? The learner talked to two local farmers to learn about planting in raised rows vs. regular spacing. That could also be Communication: Collaboration.
Previously, the teacher could leave a comment on the post, suggesting that the learner add the additional skill. And the learner could read the teacher comment, click on the post header menu, tap on 'Edit Goals' and update the post. But this use case happens so frequently that we thought it would be helpful to streamline it. So we added a button next to the post goals/skills.
Now teachers can quickly add appropriate goals/skills to a learner's posts. And those suggested goals/skills (gills? skoals? golls?) [update: we've decided to go with cogs ;) -Will 01-2021] will start with the teacher check mark. The design is simple, and doesn't add a lot of complexity to the post, which is nice, but it took us a little while to get there. I tried a whole bunch of layouts and variations before settling on a simple plus button. If you want to see some of my failed attempts, you can check out this Unrulr post.
Since early, early, early in our existence, we've been having both internal and external conversations about the permanence of posts. Are they snapshots of what's happening at a given moment? Are they living documents which describe the evolution of learning or work? The answer, which is the same answer we find ourselves coming up with more and more often: It Depends.
In many ways it would be nice if posts (the images/videos/pdfs + the caption) were unchanging. We could look back at a post and know exactly what that learner was demonstrating and when they were demonstrating it. That's especially useful when trying to figure out how much they've grown!
But in real life, that's not particularly practical. Typos happen. All. The. Time. And so captions need to be edited. And sometimes you remember, right after you hit post, "Oh, what about that other picture I had -- I should add that too!" So it would be nice if images/videos were editable too.
The typos part was immediately annoying -- nobody likes to post something with easily correctable mistakes in it. So we added caption-editing right after we launched.
However, we were a little hesitant about allowing the editing of images/videos/pdfs. Part of our concern was that if too much editing happened, it could really confuse the context of the post. If a teacher asks a learner, "Hey, I don't quite understand why you picked `Habits of Mind: Persisting`?", and the learner goes back and adds, in addition to their finished product, pictures of the two failed versions, that's great! But any future reader of the post might be confused by the teacher's comment: "Of course they chose persisting. Look how they kept going even though they failed. Twice!"
So, we spent a while hunting for a middle ground which both
And we think we finally have something that works. Users can now update the images/videos/pdfs on a post, as well as the caption. In order to avoid confusion, we now record all the changes that happen (which we think is pretty cool). By browsing through the history of a post, you get a step-by-step look at its evolution.
Many learners are super expert at this already and get their caption and their images spot-on when they post, but I, at least, find this useful because:
If you’re interested in the visual development of the history screen, I made another short Unrulr post.
For the first 18 months of our existence, we survived with the stock iOS and android media pickers. They worked, and were battle tested, but they also had a few limitations:
Two months ago we switched to a media picker modeled after the we-chat app. It handles the above three cases much better than the stock apps. It shows all videos and images in a grid, and you can pick up to nine at a time.
If you put a link in a comment and caption (any web address ending with one of the domains found here), we will now automatically make it clickable. Depending on what type of device you're using (Android, iOS or a browser), it'll either open in the default browser or a new tab.
The iOS dev kit (iPhones and iPads) offers a nice library for scanning (since the fall of 2019: iOS 13.0). We hooked that up. So if you click on the 'More' button when you're creating the post, the scan option will add the scanned images right in.
What about Android? Well, unfortunately, Android doesn't offer a scanner integration, at least right now. But there's a not-terrible way to do it on Android, because of some other features. You can:
In fact, on Android, you can send images, videos, or pdfs to Unrulr from any app which has a share/send-a-copy option. We don't have that yet on iOS. Android wins some; iOS wins some.
That's a great question. We're currently building out our roadmap for the next six months. Fred is writing up a few of the possible paths we could take, and then we're going to reach out for feedback. If you're interested in that roadmap, shoot me an email (will@our.website.name), and I'll make sure you're looped in.
And many thanks, as always, to the Unrulr community for all the feedback already given. We're a small team of two, and we couldn't do it without the reciprocal support of the learners and educators we work with.
Book a demo or create an Unrulr account today.
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter for more great content!
