Hello Coda Friends!

I am using Coda to organize my family life. I started using Coda when I found myself teaching high school chemistry during the Covid lockdown. Funny thing … I am not a teacher and I do not have a background in chemistry. That is where Coda came into my life and I have never looked back.

I used Coda to create an at-home learning platform for my three kids. The platform that their school provided was clunky, not user friendly, and was not designed to empower parents to help their kids with at-home learning. So I built a new one in Coda. This was the beginning of my Coda obsession. So of course I quickly went down a Coda rabbit hole and am now using Coda for all of our family stuff. I use Coda for recipes, shopping lists, school to-do items and many other areas.

One thing I learned during the pandemic lock down period was how my kids’ school learning platforms really work. Prior to the lockdown I knew the “parent portal” part but not the actual learning part for students. I think typical school learning platforms are too one-sided. There is a video that explains a concept and then assignments, quizzes, and an online test. The school learning platform is basically moving the physical classroom to a digital environment without using the power of a digital platform to improve upon the learning process. The school learning platforms do not add to or improve upon what the physical classroom learning setup is like.

During the pandemic when I needed to get my hands dirty with my kids’ school learning platforms, I felt like my kids were being asked to absorb a lot of material and then regurgitate it back. Instead, I wanted my kids to build their own knowledge base. I wanted them to build out a learning platform that works for how they learn best. So getting my kids to build their knowledge base using different Coda packs really brought the material to life for them.

For example, let’s say the school learning platform has one explainer video that puts your child to sleep. In Coda, the student (in this case my son ) can pull in the Coda YouTube Pack and he can add YouTube videos that he prefers. Alternatively, let’s say the class requires a lot of vocabulary, he can pull in the Coda Wikipedia Pack. My twin girls are in a Mandarin Chinese course and we were able to use the Coda Google Translate Pack to go over practice sentences. Also, for note-heavy courses the Coda Collabsible Text feature was a life saver.

Though my kids don’t realize this, they are also learning to build no- to low-code apps. My favorite takeaway from the whole experience was getting my kids to build things instead of just passively consuming material.

I am still a relative newbie to the Coda community and I hope to learn more from each of you.