One of our competitors, Tonara, is shutting down soon. Apps such as Tonara focus on the generic assignment for students. Think of the “assignment” list as a fancy grocery shopping list – a list of items or tasks, and each item could have certain things (notes, book, page number, etc.) attached to it. The assignment is either marked as completed, or it is not.
This generic “assignment” model just does not lend itself to goal-oriented teaching. What if you want to assign 5 or 10 individual goals for one of the assignments? In competing apps, you’d have to include all of these goals in a giant wall of text that is displayed as Assignment Notes all at once to the student when they practice. Some students don’t read everything you write. Other students read it and ignore some, most, or even all of it. Wouldn’t it be nice if your students were prompted to practice each of these goals one at a time? And wouldn’t it be nice if you could evaluate each individual goal separately without having to edit the “wall of text” you wrote?
This is the fundamental advantage MetaPractice has over other apps, and there are MANY more advantages MetaPractice has as well that are not even mentioned here. It isn’t just a glorified shopping list; it allows you to structure the student’s goalbook in whatever way you would structure it in a written notebook. Most importantly, your students will be tapping off individual goals as they complete them, rather than just tapping off the entire assignment each day.
Before COVID happened and so many teachers went online, many teachers were very goal-oriented in their teaching as they wrote individual goals to accomplish in physical notebooks. Apps such as Tonara helped to make the pain of online teaching a little easier to endure, but this convenience came with sacrifice, primarily making it more difficult to keep one’s teaching as goal-oriented as it was when we had the freedom of a blank page in a written notebook. MetaPractice doesn’t subdue this style of teaching, it enhances it, because with written notebooks, you have to re-write all reassigned goals each week. In MetaPractice, you just tap a goal once to complete it, and tap it again to reassign it. It is the best of both worlds: the convenience of a digital assignment book with tools that will improve the quality of your teaching and your students’ practicing above and beyond what was accomplished with the written notebook.
What if you are going to give 10 or 15 lessons this year to new students, and the books, pages and goals you assign them are identical or similar each time? The first time you give one of these lessons, just save the entire goalbook as a template, then you can load that template next time you give a similar lesson! Or you can also save a single category/subcategory and its goals (i.e. one piece) as its own template in case you want to use MetaPractice’s templates the the same way competing apps use assignments.
MetaPractice offers a 30-day free trial. If you barely looked at MetaPractice in your free trial and you’d like another one, write to support@metapractice.net and we will give you another 30-day free trial!
