Record Keeping in Self-Directed Education

A tool for the SDE Community to document the learning that happens all the time

Something cool happened this past fall – my technical knowledge and advancements in Assisted Intelligence converged and I found myself capable of building an application from scratch.

I spent many hours/day for the final 10 weeks of 2024 building Prism to solve some of the ongoing pain points that we’ve had at ALC Mosaic when it comes to documentation and building portfolios for our students.

I was learning along the way, that our problems were not unique to us. There are lots of tools that people have used over the years to document self-directed learning but none of them were designed with self-directed education in mind.

I’m looking for a few more SDE communities, self-directed microschools, homeschool programs, and homeschooling/unschooling families to use Prism while it is in private beta over the next few months.

Feedback from the 200 people already using it, along with anyone else reading this that wants to give it a try, will help inform the next round of updates, improvements and features.

Version 1 of Prism is fairly simple but meets the following needs for us that other apps couldn’t:

1. Let facilitators (“Educators” in the app), parents, and kids all be able to add portfolio entries. (V1 only has accounts for Educators and Parents, but kids can simply use the the Parent account for now)

2. Let ownership of the portfolio reside with the Parent, not the learning community/school that is primarily using the tool; this way when someone leaves the learning community they can take their portfolio and all its content with them (and potentially plug it into a different community later).

3. Let us take a picture(s) of multiple kids, say something about what is happening, add meta-data/tags, and have that portfolio entry go to all of the individual portfolios of the kids that are involved in one step.

4. Let us easily search through and filter all portfolio entries by name, date range, category, and/or tag. From here, be able to export photos related to these entries.

5. Let us  export all of one “Learner’s” portfolio entries into a PDF for any outside record keeping or validation needs (homeschool reporting requirements, educational custody, transfer records, transcript-making).

While I have a pretty clear vision for how Version 2 will help make the content, curriculum, skills, and interests embedded in any learning moment visible and trackable over time for each portfolio, there are still many other features and user patterns that will be refined from the feedback I get from folks using V1 now.

If you have any of these pain points around documenting self-directed learning and want to give Prism a shot, please reach out to me at tomis@prism.gude

Tomis has been facilitating in Self-Directed Education environments since 2009. He helped birth the first Agile Learning Center in NYC and served as the Director for three years. Now living in Charlotte, NC where he works and play at ALC Mosaic and helps organize a coherent movement for Self-Directed Education, because he believes trusting children is the most powerful catalyst for social change.