Why Every Resource on This Site Works Without a Signal
Data is expensive, coverage is uneven, and the moment a teacher needs a lesson plan is rarely the moment they have a connection. So we built the library to be carried rather than visited.
A teacher told us something that shaped how this site was built. She downloads what she needs on Sunday, when she walks into town and can borrow a connection, and she teaches from her phone for the rest of the week. If a page will not open on Wednesday, it may as well not exist.
That is the ordinary case, not the difficult one. Most of our members are working with a phone rather than a computer, with data bought in small amounts, and with coverage that varies between the monastery, the classroom and the road. A website that assumes a connection is a website that quietly excludes them.
What we did about it
This site can be installed on a phone like an application, and once installed it keeps a copy of what you have already opened. The home page and the full resource list are saved the first time you visit. After that, every resource page you open is saved as you read it, so it will open again with no signal at all.
It is not a separate app to download from a store, which would mean a large one-off download and updates you have to remember. It is the same site, saved to your phone, updating itself whenever you happen to be connected.
- The home page and the resource list are available offline from your first visit.
- Any resource or article you have opened stays available afterwards.
- The site updates itself in the background the next time you have a connection.
- Downloaded lesson plan files are kept on your phone in the normal way, so they open without a signal.
The trade we made
Building for weak connections means saying no to a great deal. There is no video on this site, because video is the fastest way to spend a teacher data budget. Pages are mostly text, and the illustrations are drawings rather than photographs, which keeps them small. Nothing loads from another company server, which is both faster and better for privacy.
The result is a site where a resource page is typically smaller than a single photograph. That is a deliberate design constraint, and it is worth more to our members than anything we could have spent that weight on.
Getting it onto your phone
The installation instructions are short and differ slightly between phones. If you are the only person at your school with a working connection, it is worth installing it on the school phone as well as your own, and worth downloading the lesson plan files for the term ahead while you have the chance.
If something does not open offline that you expected to, tell us. Every report has been useful so far, and the fix is usually small.
Does this match what you see in your classroom?
We write these from what members tell us. If your experience is different, or you have adapted something here and it worked, that is exactly what we want to hear about.
