What kinds of learning dissabilitys are there? I seem to not understand some simple things and need one to one?

How do I build database to organize my learning goals and lesson plans?

• I need to organize my lesson plans and learning goals. I have a list of learning goals. I have a list of "activities," each of which addresses one or more learning goals. I want to be able to switch easily between listing activities chronologically and grouping the activities by learning goals. What miracle software should I be using? I want to be able to look at a list of learning goals arranged in some sort of logical order (a multi-level outline would be best), and for each learning goal, see a list of the activities that address that learning goal. I want to also want to be able to arrange the activities, including worksheets, lectures, homework questions, quiz questions and exam questions in a lesson plan organized by day and weeks, sorted into a daily reading quiz, in-class activities, weekly quizzes and homework assignments, and exams. I want to be able to switch easily back and forth between these views. Right now, I'm keeping two separate documents (one with activities listed by learning goal and one of daily lesson plans) but updating and editing is a disaster. If I make any changes (e.g. to the phrasing of a learning goal or to the date of an activity) I want to make that change one place and have it propagate automatically. I want to be able to easily change the order in which the learning goals are listed, and easily move activities from one day to another. I don't fear the command line or editing text files, but drag-and-drop would sure be nice. In my mental metaphor, each activity is written on an index card (ideally including some freeform notes). I want to be able to place those index cards in chronological order, but I also want to sort them into stacks by learning goal. This is where the physical model breaks down, because each activity might have multiple learning goals, so I'd have to have multiple cards for each activity. But this thing seems like the sort of thing a computer should be able to do extremely well! Things I've tried that I haven't been able to make work: TiddlyWiki seemed like exactly what I needed, right down to the index-card metaphor, and I've used it with great success for simple notetaking. However, just "tagging" activity-tiddlers with learning goals isn't flexible enough, and I needed to work out how to sort things by date, but the online documentation is all over the place. It seems to jump from "here are the basics" to "you are proficient in javascript [I am not] and steeped in the eccentric vocabulary of TiddlyWikis" without much in between. And there's a LOT of documentation, but for all the different versions, and the stuff I want to do seems to be highly version-dependent. Also TiddlyWikis are too vulnerable to file munging, and I'm also terrified of putting a HUGE amount of work into it and then find that it's broken by some browser update and it never gets fixed. Excel doesn't do blocks of verbose text well, doesn't gracefully handle tagging an activity with multiple learning goals. Fundamentally, I feel like I need a spreadsheet with a third dimension. I'm also not an Excel expert, so if there's some clever way to do what I want to do in Excel, let me know. (I thought pivot tables would be the answer, but they seem only able to count and add things, not display text?) I use a Mac. I'm comfortable at the command line and willing to do some programming, but I don't want this to turn into a second-career software development job. I'm willing to pay a few tens of dollars but not hundreds of dollars for software packages. I don't have any need to share with anyone else, and I'd just as soon have something that's just on my hard drive. I do want to be able to use this for years and years, so I fear hinky fly-by-night cloud services that are liable to disappear. I think maybe I need a database, but I haven't worked with databases extensively. The simple options I've looked at seemed too simple and clearly couldn't do my two different views, and I don't know enough about databases to even know what features I'm looking for in a more complicated package. I think a "personal" database is what I want, but the ones I'm looking at seem more oriented toward pretty color schemes and ease of use than the kind of sorting/resorting I want to do, and, while they are within my price range, and, frustratingly, none of them have free trials, and I don't want to drop a bunch of money on things that don't work for me. Do you have extensive experience with some software does what I want? Or can you suggest a metaphor-flip that will make this solvable using Excel or something simple?

• Answer:

  If you're looking to simplify this somewhat, I LOVE https://trello.com/. I've used it for years and tend to think about it like index cards on steroids. It's original use was to be an online http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board, but it's SO much more than that. Once you get the hang of it (takes about 5 minutes or less), you'll wonder how you lived without it. Online, Android and iPhone app, so it can follow you around.