Traces, documenting homeschooling in Quebec

Homeschooling, Quebec

Traces of learning organised & paperwork made simple

Photographing what your children do, day after day, then producing the documents the Direction de l'enseignement à la maison asks for, simply. Everything is saved on your device, and no personal data is sent anywhere else (except to your own cloud, if you decide to set it up for automatic backups).

Open the app Try the demo

Free, no account, no app store. The demo is filled with a made-up family: you can touch everything without breaking anything.

The entry screen: the child, the subject, the length and a line about the activity

Day to day

One photo, and the trace exists

The home screen is the camera. You take the photo, you tick who and which subject, you write a line about what was done. One trace can cover several children and several subjects at once: a museum outing counts in social studies and in French, for the three children who were there.

If the moment is not right, take the photo and leave the rest blank. The trace shows up in the feed as « to finish » and waits. Nothing is lost, and nothing waits on the network: capture is local first.

That leaves the question that makes people give up: which competency of the program do I tick? A file to attach to your AI answers in your place, from what you tell it.

The capture screen — **Capture.** The big button takes the photo. « From the camera roll » catches up on what was not documented at the time, and « No photo » creates a trace for a discussion or a reading. The photos left on the computer come in through the same button.

The table of evidence by competency — **At a glance.** A compulsory subject with no trace at all, a subject with nothing for three weeks, and, as soon as a subject reaches three traces, the competencies none of them covers yet. The evidence count is kept subject by subject.

What has to be submitted

Three documents out of four fill themselves in

Four documents, each coming out as a PDF through its print button. The learning project is filled in by ticking, at the start of the year. The other three are built from your traces: the app pulls in the activities, the time and the evidence. The « ? » on each section quotes the ministry requirement it answers.

Start of year
Learning project

To submit and put under way no later than September 30. It is built by ticking types of activity per subject, each tick spelled out in your own words.
During the year Optional
Booklet of traces

Nothing obliges you to bring it to the monitoring meeting, but arriving with three traces per subject, already chosen and printed, changes the meeting: you show instead of recounting from memory. « Choose for me » picks them from different competencies, and you swap out the ones you would rather present another way.
Between the third and fifth month Optional
Status report and mid-term report

The pilot project puts everything through the monitoring meeting, out loud. So this document is not required anywhere. It stays very useful: it gathers on one page the activities carried out, the time spent and the changes to the project, none of which comes back to you from memory in front of someone.
End of year
Completion report and portfolio

To submit no later than June 15. The report follows the ministry's template. The portfolio has none: its layout is the one from Traces, designed so the evidence reads at a glance. It calls for at least three dated and varied pieces of evidence per evaluated compulsory subject.

What they look like once printed

The printed learning project — Learning project

The printed booklet of traces — Booklet of traces

The printed status report — Status report

The printed report and portfolio — Report and portfolio

Swipe to see them all. The data is that of the made-up family in the demo.

The list of documents by time of year — **Three moments.** Start, middle and end of year, with each deadline worked out from your own starting date.

A child's file, subject by subject — **Subject by subject.** A subject is ready when it has a comment, an appraisal and its three pieces of evidence. The time is worked out from the traces, and stays editable.

What one mother wrote to me

What I find most brilliant is that you make homeschooling easier for a lot of parents who, like me, have plenty of ideas and a lovely rapport with their child, but who struggle to find the time to manage the traces of their teaching.

I often felt lost in the process of « putting together » the portfolio and my reports… and yet, in meetings, my assessors thought I had such lovely projects… For me it was always hard: but not any more, thanks to this wonderful app you created, which helps me manage the chaos in my head! 😌

Thank you for this, I feel this year will be so much lighter for me: you take away the load that was making me anxious… and you leave me with all the confidence and love I have to give to my homeschooling 😊💕

Maude D.

Privacy

Your traces do not leave your device

There is no account, no sign-up, no advertising, no tracker. The traces, the photos and the children's names live in your device's browser. Nobody else has access to them, myself included.

Four things leave, and only those four:

pCloud, if you connect your own account so the photos are filed automatically by child, grade and subject. Nothing is preconfigured and your password is typed in at pCloud. The guide for connecting it, if the safety net appeals to you.
Voice dictation, which goes through the browser's speech recognition, so through an outside service. The button says so before it turns on.
The anonymous count, once a day: how many children, in which cycles, how many traces, which documents produced. Never a first name, never a photo, never a sentence you wrote, never a text field. That is what tells me what is useful in an app I give away, and the policy is read and accepted the first time you open it.
Your email address, only if you type it in yourself in the news card. It goes to Klaviyo, the service that holds my mailing list. It is the only thing that comes to me, and the only one that has nothing to do with your children's schooling. No record and no photo goes with it.

The trade-off, to read before you start

Backing up is your responsibility. Clearing the browser data, reinstalling the system or losing the device wipes everything, and nobody can give back what is gone. The app produces a full backup file, photos included, and shows at every opening how long it has been since you last made one.

Install

On your phone, in three taps

Traces is a web page that installs like an app. Once on the home screen, it opens full screen, starts fast and works without a network.

On the device where you want to install it, tap « Open the app », the button further down this page.
On iPhone or iPad, with Safari: tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen, then « Add to Home Screen ». Safari is required: installing does not work from Chrome on iOS.
On Android, with Chrome: tap the three-dot menu at the top right, then « Install and create shortcut », and finally « Install ». Be sure to pick « Install » and not « Create shortcut »: a shortcut merely opens Chrome, with no full screen and no offline. Depending on the version, the entry is simply called « Install app ».
On a computer, with Chrome or Edge: click the install icon that appears at the end of the address bar.

The same screen in three of the six themes — Six themes, in the settings. Here **Traces**, the official colours, **Forest**, sage green and wood, and **Ink**, with a dark screen for documenting in the evening. The choice only touches the screen: the documents you submit print black on white either way.

Get started

Create your first trace in a few minutes

You open it, you add your children, and you can document your first trace today.

Open the app Try the demo The guide as a PDF

Support

Help me keep Traces free for families 🥹

The Traces app is open to every family, including those counting every dollar. That is possible because others give a donation now and then. Each donation keeps it that way for everyone, and gives me the breath to build more.

traces

One photo, and the trace exists

Three documents out of four fill themselves in

Learning project

Booklet of traces

Status report and mid-term report

Completion report and portfolio

Your traces do not leave your device

On your phone, in three taps

Create your first trace in a few minutes

Help me keep Traces free for families 🥹