LessonApp

Tag: softwaredevelopment

  • Impacting an early stage Start Up as designer

    Impacting an early stage Start Up as designer

    The writer is an UX designer Harri Halonen, who rocked a summer with us. Here are some toughts from him:

    This summer I joined LessonApp as in-house UX professional. The summer revolved heavily around front-end development duties in a team with Tuomas the full stack developer. Together we were an effective pair not only in squashing bugs and mending usability issues on bigger screen ratios, but bringing several new features to life, planned by our core team pedagogy experts in co-operation with our stakeholders. To address the current need remote teaching Distance Teaching pedagogy section and lesson plans were added. Filtering for suitable lesson plans was upgraded as number of lessons available has grown. Number of registered users has grown, so to establish better co-operation with them a more accessible bug reporting and feedback tool has been made available.

    To be effective and go the distance I had to flex my designer muscle not only with the product but with the process as well. There are enormous opportunities to contribute to an early stage startup. I found that it is an imperative that one maintains an open mind about what your job responsibilities are, for continued growth as a designer. To anyone facing a similar situation I can tell that no one truly has titles in this kind of a company. Learn to accept this, look pass the hiring title, be brave and find your role and you will be free to design good software.

    Wanting to impact the product, I started by impacting the process. This was done by sharing knowledge. Iterating upon learnings from my previous design & dev experience I introduced concepts from lean and Scrum to the process. Leadership in agile teams does not look at the company hierarchy. Still, real increased productivity was not brought on by sprint boards and daily videoconference standups, even though communication inside dev team and organizing tickets is paramount, but from increased motivation on prioritizing tasks that impact the direction of the product the most. Follow up with deciding what to measure quantitatively is important for benchmarking the changes made, this all in the name of rapid failure in iterating the direction of the work.

    In implementation, product development polarity helped, pairing with full stack developer and focusing on polarized responsibilities, we can enhance the level of thinking for the product and effectively build responsive and usable end product that is crisp, clean and sparking joy with its colors and typography. I can speak for both of us, when I express that our main motivation is creating as much value as possible to end-users within our fast-weeklong sprints. Support of the rest of the team on this is valuable, as the deliverables are checked timely, tested by all team members to support rapid release cycle. Here we work on the same goals and drive progress to the same direction. For me this made LessonApp a really good place to work.

    LessonApp will be more exciting than ever with major upcoming features releasing this fall. These will have an impact on how teachers plan together and document their planned work effectively to stay on track themselves and to satisfy the needs of school administration. If not already registered I encourage you to do so now.

    This is my 3-months’ reflection. I hope this is helpful for anyone reading this blog. If, anyone wants to share what they are excited about working at their company, you’re most welcome to comment or connect with me! Thanks for reading.

  • The New Era of Learning project enabled a LessonApp workshop with TAMK

    “The Smart Learning Environments for the Future project offers an excellent opportunity for companies to develop their products in collaboration with users, namely pupils, students and teachers. The project provides companies with an opportunity to gain valuable user experience in a facilitated manner and test their products and services in the educational institutions of Finland’s largest cities, thus giving participating companies a valuable reference for the future.” from The New Era of Learning project website which is a part of6Aika project.

    With the support of The New Era of Learning project, LessonApp had a workshop organized in collaboration with TAMK Tampere University of Applied Science in April 2019. The workshop was about developing LessonApp by the help of educational experts and all people interested in the topic of edtech startup development.

    In the workshop the participants familiarized themselves with LessonApp and gave feedback about LessonApp’s current features. They also generated new ideas about how to use LessonApp in their own worklife and what features they would add.

    You could read more about the workshop from the project site (in Finnish):

    https://www.oppimisenuusiaika.fi/tamk-tapahtumat/lessonapp-kannykalla-tuntisuunnitelmia/
  • Software development in action!

    Software development in action!

    LessonApp is continuously under construction by our software developing team, which includes our co-founder Tuomas and couple of part-time coders. They are sweating to get new features running and available for our growing teacher community. Thumbs up for their effort!

    Our latest features for Premium version are
    1) Method classification, which helps to find suitable method for a specific school subject and
    2) Like button, to give and get feedback in the form of an apple

    We have a dream to make this app “a Treasure Chest for Teachers” to find new ideas both in good or stressful times. There are a lot of new features we would like to include, but as a young startup, software development takes time.

    Next we have planned to code:

    • Self assessment tool for teachers to develop themselves and to acknowledge their professional development.
    • Commenting lessons to allow discussing and reflecting how the lesson went in reality.
    • Following other lesson planners to get notifications when your favorite teacher plans a new lesson.
    • STEAM library for lessons and projects to integrate science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics
    • Saving draft lessons to allow to continue planning the lesson later on.
    • A possibility to choose with whom you share your lesson plan, for example just for your school community or yourself.
    • Print and/or share your plan for example for students or colleagues.

    What do you think we should do next?

    Please, comment and share your ideas, which of the above features are the best and should be done next? Or do you have your own wish? Take part in the discussion in the comments or answer the poll in our Facebook or Twitter page. We believe in co-creation and would love to take your opinion into account!

    Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/LessonAppFI/posts/1292220580934617
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/LessonApp/status/1114082193008148481

  • Pedagogy first, technology second

    ”It’s so easy to use!”

    “You grasp the idea of innovative lesson planning at once!”

    These are the best possible feedback we get from the teachers. (My personal favorite is: “This is too good to be true!” ?). What we wanted to create in the first place was a tool for teachers to help them in their work.

    We never invented a mind-blowing technology first and then started thinking “What could we use this for?” For us the pedagogy came first. We wanted to pack the modern, research-based pedagogy into a simple-to-open package.

    We wanted the innovative lesson planning to be visually seen and easily understood.

    The key questions were: How to make it really easy to perceive a lesson structure that promotes learning? How to make it effortless to choose from various effective and inspiring ways to carry out lessons?

    We wanted the tool to be easy to perceive and understand. Making the lesson planning visual seemed to offer the simplicity we were looking for. Creating different building blocks to represent the different, yet essential phases of lessons, provided the users the possibility to construct their own lessons. Moreover dragging the needed building blocks to lesson planning template gave users a concrete experience of actually constructing the lesson themselves.

    Pedagogy was clear, but making everything work smoothly needed different kind of expertise. Only talented coders with knowledge about user-friendly interface could make the technology work invisibly for the user. Furthermore we needed teachers to use and test the app to find out about all the bugs and features not working optimally for them.

    Our aim was to co–create the app with the actual end-users. Only when teachers find the app working seamlessly and providing ease for their everyday work, have we achieved our goal. We wanted to make the giving feedback for us as easy as possible, so we put the Contact us button in the main menu of LessonApp.

    Listening feedback from teachers is still the most valuable source of ideas for us.

    But it seems, we have probably done something right: we just got acknowledged by Apiumhub when they listed 10 most promising edtech solutions that are making a difference in the way we learn. Their description of LessonApp was succinct: “t is a very simple app that helps teachers to organise their classes in a very Finnish way.”

    Thank you Apiumhub for your credit! It seems we’re on the right path ?.