Diary Lenses – An Alternative View

What are they?

Do you ever get someone in your car who cannot grasp something that every other student has understood without any problem at all? Isn't it frustrating? What do you do? Say the same thing over and over again with a slight increase in volume each time? Roll your eyes and move on to the next subject in the hope that they don't notice? Or do you try to find another way of explaining it until they do understand it?

We're all different and something that brings clarity to one person may not do the same for the next. Good instructors know this and will try to find a different way of looking at it, perhaps a different way that makes more sense to the person who is trying to understand it.

Likewise, sometimes we need to use an alternative view, look at things in a different way, take a different perspective to bring clarity to what we are seeing in order to gain more benefit from it.

This is what diary lenses is all about. It gives you a different view of your diary, a view which you can influence to make it more meaningful.

Where are they?

On both the mobile app and the web app there is a diary lens dropdown menu at the top of the diary. The options on the menu are different depending on whether you are on the web or the mobile. On the latter you have 2 options, Admin Status and Lesson Type; on the former you have both of those plus Vehicle. The lenses are mutually exclusive i.e., you cannot look at Admin Status and Lesson Type at the same time.

The chosen lens is remembered even if you go to other tabs e.g., Students, and it will only return to the default lens if you refresh the screen or log out and log in.

Admin Status

This is the default view and shows whether lessons are upcoming (yellow), past and incomplete (red) or past and complete (green). For the sake of completeness we also include tests which always appear in black. You cannot change these colours as they are set by the system.

Lesson Type

This shows the colour of the lesson based on the lesson type. The default lesson colours are pre-loaded when you start using MDT with standard lessons being yellow, refresher lessons being pink etc.

However, you CAN change these colours to whatever you require by going into the lesson types on your mobile app and reassigning colours as you wish. In the examples in this blog, you will see that I have deviated considerably from the default settings - guess my favourite colour!

Therefore, when setting the lens to Lesson Type you can see all your lessons in their lesson type colour.

Vehicle

This shows the colour of the lesson based on the vehicle that the student is assigned to. The colour that it displays for each vehicle is initially randomly generated i.e., it is not based on the colour of your actual vehicle (just in case you have 3 red cars), but it will subsequently always appear in that generated colour. Therefore, if you have 2 vehicles, one manual and one automatic, once the colours are assigned, for example, manual comes up as blue and automatic comes up as yellow, by using the vehicle lens, you will always know which vehicle you require for a given lesson. This is, of course, dependent on you assigning the student to a vehicle on their profile.

If no vehicle has been assigned, the lesson will appear in grey. If you do not have any vehicles in the system, then you will not get that option on the list of available lenses.

... and finally

We appreciate that this might seem like a really insignificant change that surely can't be more important than some of the other features/changes that we have on our schedule. However, one of the keys to efficient software development is being able to align what we need to do with the resources that are available at a given moment and this little nugget fitted in beautifully whilst there was a brief but necessary wait in another piece of development. Nothing has been delayed as a result. 😊

For technical support, to report problems with the app or if you have any questions about this release, please email support@mydrivetime.co.uk.