Trello for planning/Student daily work

[My4arrows]

Has anyone used Trello for planning purposes or for this DC to use as a checklist of daily and weekly work?  I'm curious how it worked out, does the appeal end and does it help with independent work transition?

[wendyroo]

I started using it as a daily/weekly checklist for my son mid-5th grade. He is now finishing 6th grade and is still using it...though it has gone through a ton of iterations in how we use it.

I'm not sure there was ever much "appeal" to it. I guess my son did enjoy changing the background color, adding emojis, and making his own cards for fun activities at the very beginning. But pretty quickly he realized it was just a necessary evil, just like the paper list he used before that.

That said, we continue to use it for the convenience and benefits. I can make a template of a typical week and quickly copy and tweak it to generate a new list for him each week. I can share his list with him and my husband so that we can all check in on his progress through the week. He can tag cards with our color coded system to let me know if things are done, ready for checking, need help, etc. He can comment on cards, for example, I sometimes have him write a one sentence narration of his lit reading right onto the daily literature task card in Trello. I can add checklists and due dates to cards.

During some iterations I pre-sort his tasks into the days of the week. Other times I have tried sorting them into subject area and letting him pick what specific tasks he will do for each subject each day. Other times we have pre-sorted the tasks by his perceived difficulty, and then he has to drag them onto the days of the week in a balanced or front-loaded manner such that he doesn't put off all the hard activities until the end of the week. The beauty of Trello is that you never delete anything. You archive things so they aren't cluttering up your page, but they are always there if you want to go back and dig them up. So I have many old archived templates that I can re-open if I want to try them again or take elements from them. Just today I went back and found an old card scheduling a week of Writing with Skill; we finished WWS1 months ago, so it hasn't been in recent templates, but now we are starting WWS2 and I didn't want to have to reinvent the wheel.

The biggest reason that I continue to use Trello with my son is that I think using it, or something very similar, will be a very important and necessary part of his future endeavors. Executive function and self-discipline are his greatest weaknesses. We need to do a lot of mentoring and experimenting to figure out how his brain works and what systems best help him meet his responsibilities. Trello allows us to try a lot of different systems with a lot of different levels of supervision and support.

[happypamama]

I started using Trello this year for all four boys. I haven't been using it much lately for the younger two, except that I do use it for our history, because I put the stuff to read and all in there. I think it would be more helpful if they were more independent, but they aren't much yet.  My older boys, 6th and 10th, do continue to use it. I made each card a day's worth of work per subject. Some subjects don't need the cards as much, but for history and English, it's been great. I like that I can see it on my phone or laptop, and it syncs well with their devices too. 

 

I will probably use it for next year, especially for things like Notgrass history, which will integrate history, literature, and Bible, varying a bit throughout the days, so my 7th grader will be able to tell what his daily assignments are easily. 

[blendergal]

We used it for a season. What I like best is how easy it is to move things around — when life happens or just according to your own whims. I think it could also be super handy if you often need to point your student to websites or online resources, because you can attach that to the directly to the card.

The curriculum we use is mostly of the hard copy, do-the-next thing variety, though. And I didn’t like spending so much time on devices, even if it’s just for the purpose of checking things off. So we aren’t using it anymore. Never say never, though!