School Desk in 2022

Happy New Year from us at School Desk! I’m very thankful for all the customers that helped School Desk grow from a seedling idea to useful service in 2021.

I’d like to share with you what I see happening in the upcoming year. School Desk is maturing continuously, and I want to describe some of the “big rocks” that are coming up.

My family runs our homeschool on the calendar year, so my wife just finished off the school year for our kids before we left to visit our family during the Christmas break. With the school year over, we need some kind of historical record that we can use to prove to our local government that we’re educating our children.

The reports section has most of the data that is needed, but there is a lot of clicking around and printing to get the required data. This year, I plan to add a year end report bundle. This bundle will package all of the details about your school year and the activities for each of your students into a single zip file containing PDF reports. With this bundle, you’ll get a full snapshot of the school year that you can use as evidence for whatever local government requirements (or personal archiving goals) that you have.

What happens when your kids have a field trip? School Desk’s break system can achieve a lot of what is needed, but it would be nice to be able to tie those breaks to specific courses or highlight them as a different type of activity. One of my goals this year is to build a simple and intuitive workflow for handling field trips. My hope is that the fields trips will allow you to better represent more of the realities that happen in a school year.

Aside from features, I’m committed to improving the user experience and level of polish that people expect from modern websites. On the boring level, this means I will continue to update all the software under the hood (like open source software) to keep the site safe, secure, and fast. I’ll also continue to improve the ease of use and sanding down any rough edges in the workflows.

How can you help School Desk if you’re interested?

First, your continued feedback improves School Desk week by week. As a software developer and not an educator, I depend on your insight to make School Desk a more useful tool for homeschool educators.

Secondly, word of mouth is the best way to help others learn about School Desk and give them a chance to have easier homeschool scheduling too. While I’m not afraid to jump into a homeschool forum to share what I know and point people to School Desk on occasion, being a professional software developer doesn’t put me on much common ground with other homeschool educators. Your recommendation to others really help the site grow into something more sustainable.

Finally, if you like School Desk and would be willing to share, I would love to have other voices on the homepage that can encourage others to give School Desk a try. If you’re able to share a quote that can go on that page, I’d love to hear from you.

I’m hoping that School Desk will be the best homeschool planning software in 2022. Thank you for your help and continued support. Here’s to another year of easier homeschool scheduling!