Documentation

Getting started

Welcome to ALOS. This guide walks an educator through the first journey — from signing in to planning a week, capturing a child's work, and recording their progress. Follow it end to end, or jump to the step you need.

After signing in, you land on your Dashboard. It shows the current date, a card for each of your students (name, developmental stage, grade, and learning language), and a sidebar with Dashboard, Students, Activities, and Settings, with Sign out at the bottom. Selecting a student's card opens their detail view — the home for everything about that child.

Add your first student

From Students (or the Dashboard), choose Add student and fill in the short profile:

First and last name
Date of birth
Grade level
Learning language — English or Français, the language the child learns in
Curriculum — International or Québec Elementary
Interests, to help personalize activities

Save, and you land on the new student's detail view. The student is assigned to you automatically. Richer profile details can be edited later, and setting a starting point is the next step.

Set a starting point

A placement assessment records roughly where a child is in each of the ten learning domains, so plans and progress begin from the right place. Open the student, choose the placement step, and set a level for each domain. ALOS needs this baseline before it generates a plan or a learning project. You can revise it until the first plan or learning project exists; after that it stays as the year's starting point, and ongoing growth is recorded in Progress instead.

Plan a week and generate activities

Open the student's weekly plan. ALOS organizes a week into Experiences — short thematic sequences — and each Experience can hold several Activities.

Generate a plan to have ALOS draft a week of Experiences from the child's profile, curriculum, and progress. You can also add your own Experiences by hand.
Within an Experience, Generate an activity and ALOS designs it in full — the concept to teach, the child's instructions, the steps, and an estimated time. Generate as many as you like; each one is reviewed on its own.
Review each activity and Approve the ones you want the child to see. Only approved activities reach the child.

The child's day

In their own space — My Day — the child sees the activities you approved as friendly cards, and nothing else. They work through them, can ask the built-in tutor for hints on their work — and real answers to their own questions — and mark each one done. A finished activity comes back to you for a quick review before it counts as complete.

Capture the child's work as evidence

Whatever the child produces — a piece of writing, a photo, a drawing, an audio clip — becomes evidence in their portfolio. The child can write and submit text from their Create space; photos, drawings, audio and PDFs are added by you from the student's Portfolio. Each piece is tagged to the activity it came from, so the portfolio builds itself as the week unfolds.

Record progress

Open the student and choose View Progress. A new student starts empty — select Record progress, pick a domain, and its competencies appear, each with the seven progress states (from Not yet introduced, through Practicing and Demonstrates understanding, to Applies in new contexts and Needs review). Click the state that fits and it saves immediately.

Competencies that already have evidence are surfaced first, with that evidence shown for context.
If you set a placement for the domain, ALOS suggests a starting state — you confirm or change it, and nothing is ever set automatically.

Create an assessment or report

Once a student has some progress recorded, ALOS can draft an assessment or report for you to review. Open the student, choose Assessments → New Assessment, enter the reporting period, and Generate. ALOS writes a draft in both English and French — an overall summary plus a narrative for each domain the child has progress in. Edit anything you like, then Finalize to freeze it as the official record. Finalized reports can be exported as a PDF.

Print a worksheet for offline work

Any activity can become a printable worksheet the child completes on paper, away from a screen. Open the activity, choose Prepare for print, then Print / Generate PDF. The PDF has three parts — a teaching section, the worksheet(s), and an answer key at the end. Photograph the finished sheets and add them from the student's Portfolio (the activity's capture link opens it with the activity already selected), and the work flows into the portfolio just like any other evidence.

Curious about the monthly limits included with your plan? See Usage & fair-use limits.