Declaration of Independence, & Constitution

If you’re wondering what the fuss has been over the last eight years and what this “voting” thing is all about, you might want to begin at the beginning by listening to voiceover artist, Debra Jean Dean’s readings of the The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Free MP3s of the recordings are available for download under a Creative Commons license. I’m hoping for the Magna Carta next.

Tutortrac Wish List

1. Give administrators the ability to assign any combination of a tutor’s specialties to any of that tutors’ group sessions on a per session basis so that a tutor’s combination of specialties within any given session is determined by an administrator rather than a software default. “@” is not a workable solution given the spread within a given tutor’s specialties and the frequency of courses with similar content but different course codes.”#” leads to an unpredictable weekly calendar for students with locked-in class schedules.

2. Code in boolean and set function into the tutor specialty assignment feature; not, and, or and/or etc. How about creating sessions where the session type or course changes if no students make appointments by a set time. The session type becomes increasingly inclusive until the first sign up at which point the type locks in. Make the program intelligent.

3. Recode “*” so that administrators can decide whether subsequent students who sign in need only be enrolled in the same subject, course or specific section.

4. Provide release notes whenever Tutortrac is upgraded. This would help users to familiarize themselves with changes before students become subject to the changes.

5. Give individual centers the option to have a different maximum number of scheduled sessions per given time period. Have per course per day and per week minimums that are center specific.

6. Provide a way of temporarily constraining the number of appointments students can make per week, i.e. not more than three individual appointments per week. Perhaps tie this in to number of missed sessions so that the function is activated automatically. The more appointments students miss the fewer multiple appointments they can make in a given time period.

7. Provide a way to automatically pop-up different user hints whenever students search for an appointment. Give students option to disable.

8. Code a dashboard of dynamic performance indices and a form creation tool that accesses both analytic and descriptive data. Don’t just package data. Turn this data into actionable easily interpretable information.

9. Wherever possible, use radio buttons instead of drop down menus. They’re just faster, i.e when students sign out and must answer short survey questions.

10. Always couple course codes with course titles. It’s infuriating trying to read reports that only reference course codes. At the very least provide a way to easily perform a find/replace.

11. Make the student worker screen more helpful by allowing student workers to sort student list by tutor, time-order, or alpha-order as needed. Also make sure that the entire list of students is printable, at present just screenshots are possible. Sorted hardcopies are crucial to efficient traffic control. Make student names clickable so that all their appointments for a given period is displayed and easily accessible. Makes service signed in for changeable by student workers in case of wrong entry by student.

12. Student workers cannot get access to useful student information such as appointment and visit history without also being given access to other student information such as address, GPA, SAT scores, etc.

13. Perform a complete design overhaul of user interface. Eye candy doesn’t have to be empty calories. Color, sound, some really minimal animation, and composition can help users to navigate better. For instance, checking out takes about 3-7 seconds too long. The delay contributes to sloppy data collection or input errors. Simply making the text bigger, utilizing more contrasting colors and as before, using radio buttons instead of drop down menus would help. As it stands, the application’s muted gray color scheme and small text make it difficult to read for older students and fatiguing for power users. As an example, the continue button on the sign-out window is too unobtrusive. Some students complete the sign-out process but do not click complete because they don’t notice the button. This is a case where some color, resizing and repositioning would be advantageous.

14. Search for more opportunities to idiot-proof your product rather than hoping users will follow protocol. For instance, students must be encouraged to select a center before searching for a tutoring sessions. If they don’t, they get incorrect results. Students who ought to read the directions but don’t find this quite frustrating. Or, when students search for a subject but none are available, don’t just return nothing.  Explain what happened to students and what are there options and/or give administrators an option to do something useful given this outcome.

15. Provide a more informative student search screen so that students can determine what sessions are available, mixed subject groups, single subject groups, etc. Hiding the choice behind a drop down menu and requiring students to make the selection before searching doesn’t factor in actual user behavior. Place all the choices on the screen and use radio buttons to select. Again the entire composition of the screen should not be an afterthought.

16. Program in some simple fuzzy logic, i.e., if a student makes concurrent appointments and they show up for the first appointment and are still in the center at the time of the subsequent ones then TT should assume that they are there for the subsequent appointments. Perhaps make this feature a selectable administrator option. Students shouldn’t have to sign in and out again. Also, TT should recognize users with multiple accounts, such as staff and student, and query as to which one is to be used. This problem makes it problematic to use TT as a timeclock when most of our staff also have student accounts. Asking staff to keep multiple accounts seems a rather backwards solution.

17. Keep deleted sessions of an ongoing appointment deleted. Re-saves cause the deleted sessions to be recreated without notice, causing scheduling errors.  This would simply require the program to remember that the one session only option was selected and keep that option until user de-selects.

18. Require students to click on an “I have read and agree to policies” button before they can use TT for the first time.

19. It’s impossible for tutors to determine what subjects their students have signed up for without a lot of clicking and nesting. Include subject on the tutor main menu and number of session attended. Don’t require nested drill down to locate this information.

20. Require students to leave or change email and cellphone information when first logging in.

21. Allow more fine-grained control of administrator access/exclusions than what’s available. There’s too much opportunity for unchecked and unrecorded shenanigans. For instance, I may not necessarily want to give another center access to my reports although they would need to have access to their own.

22. When designated staff are scheduling students, make ‘class’ designations automatically create multiple appointments in the same way that ‘private’ designations automatically create multiple appointments.

23. Prevent students from being able to schedule appointments for sessions that have already elapsed.

24. Create a ticketing system for service calls to cut down on having to repeat the problem to multiple technicians. Help desk programs are free and available on the net.

25. Make the default selection from a list, ‘no selection.’ If a selection is mandatory, force users to have to make a selection before proceeding. This feature should activated universally, but especially whenever students are selecting center, service, or course. The lazy choice should never be the wrong choice.

26. Create a mobile web option so that students can interface with TT using their smartphones.

27. Report absences in instructor reports, not just attendances.

28. Make it possible to input more than one IP or domain range restriction for an administrator account.

29. Make Tutortrac calculate total salary as tutor sessions are added to the schedule. This is anticipated expenditures, not time-clock calculation. Recalculate if schedule change, etc.

30. Have key developers intern in a learning Center for a brief period. Doing so would minimize a disconnect between developer and end user. There is a remarkable disconnect. Many of the corrections that could and should be made to Tutortrac are quite obvious if someone used it for a brief period of time, i.e. a login button that doesn’t work properly, a function that is too deeply nested to be readily accessible, user errors that can’t be corrected at the point of occurrence, etc.

31. Create a robust online user community. Keep the moderation to a minimum.  If I want to ask you a question I’ll email you.  I want to communicate with other users.  That’s the point.  Transparency might be uncomfortable but your users are your best resource and the ensuing dialog can only make your product better.

32.  Create a place to leave notes specific to a given semester, beginning and end dates, winter storms, etc.

33. Webcast key portions of your conference.

34. Reports needed – cost per student per tutor/cost per visit per tutor/all reports should easily incorporate warning notices and grades/courses by name & course code.  Really what’s needed here is customer polling, filtering the most useful requests, running it past a statistician and a design consultant and creating a seamless integration among data collection, data mining, data imaging (tables, graphs, and such), and data presentation (report writing.)

35. Decouple canceling appointments override from making appointments override.  It’s possible to want to authorize one but not the other.

36. The lending library component is hopelessly broken.  The latest glitch.  Reserving an item makes Tutortrac start sending late notices to the last person that returned the item.  These sorts of things really annoy students.

37. Provide a robust punch/time clock feature rich enough to be standalone program. What is available is anemic.

38. Make the application skinnable so that visitors don’t feel that they are going to a third part site and can’t bookmark the application and thereby bypass site specific information.

39. Provide support for by appointment only tutoring sessions, i.e inactivate the appointment if students haven’t signed up by a certain date and time, indicate prominently the types of session so students can quickly distinguish, provide tooltips and contextual menus to help students navigate the application.

40. Make it easy to print out the schedule for the day.  Everything that would be helpful to know if Tutortrac gets hosed.  Again, lots of clicking and printing out different sheets to get information that’s helpful to make decisions.

41. Once a center purchases Tutortrac it becomes a hybrid organization. A center cannot commit to the constant pursuit of excellence if Tutortrac does not. Be the company that defines the standard. Consistently exceed users’ expectations. Think different(ly). Think big.

42. Practice ABI, always be innovating.  It’s been over ten years and with a supposedly mature program I’m expecting an iphone application, not finally being able to display to a student who is their tutor when they sign in to the center.

Sourlands Mountain Preserve

Sourlands Mountain Preserve is a highly recommended bit of mother nature in the heart of Jersey that feels sorta back country but isn’t too far away from civilization and cell connection. Activities include bouldering, hiking, horseback riding, biking and bird-watching. Click ridge trail for detailed description of one of the most picturesque beginner trails in NJ. Click for photo gallery.

Send yourself a delayed email, text or phone reminder

These sites help you to stay on track of those too easily forgotten appointments by allowing you to send yourself or someone else a delayed email, text or voice reminder.

DeadJohn/email
For Later/email
Future Mail/email/register
Future Me/email
Hassle Me/email/re-occurring
Joopz/email to text/text to email
Jot You/email/location specific activation
Jott/voice mail to delayed text or email
L8r/email/register
Letter me Later/email/lots of features!
Mail Freezr/ email
Mind Caller/voicemail
Monkey on Your Back/email/re-occurring/register
Note2Email/email/not delayed
Oh Don’t Forget/text
Phone My Phone/phone/re-occurring
Ping Me/email/text/register
Remindtron/email
Sandy/email/register
Slydial/leave voice message w/o 2nd party knowing
Snoozester/phone/register/fee-based
Text Memos/text
Time Machiner/email
Waker Upper/phone/text
Where’s my Cell Phone/phone/re-occurring
Yourlist/email

Read privacy agreements before submitting your email address.