skigg
Part of the problem is unclear copy upfront. Here’s the first sentence:
> Today We Learned is a website and app that guides teachers through a 60-second update, which empowers parents to start learning conversations at home with their children.
How can guiding teachers empower parents? It doesn’t provide enough information to make sense. Being guided through an update is a passive thing to have happen to you; there’s no reason for us to assume that the teacher is taking action here, or that the update goes not to them but to the parents alone. Presumably the writer wanted to avoid any forthright statements that the teachers will have to work for the app to be useful, but in doing so they buried the purpose of the program. And the only other sentence above the fold, rather than clarifying, is boilerplate: and this is a good thing.
Looks like an interesting app, though. I’d be curious to know what percentage of users actually go in for the paid mobile app—email and web access being the universal here.
"Easy to edit," to take a phrase from your first link, is key.
(While these books, of course, are written for use with dip pens, and frequently taken up by users of fountain pens today, the methods described do work with ballpoints, rollerballs, gel pens, pencils of not too hard a lead, nearly whatever you have lying about.)
Of course, retooling is almost certainly not worth it for you, unless you're dying for a break from computer screens (the only reason I ever write by hand anymore). But I'll leave the link in case anyone is curious, either for their own work or just to know what people used to do with a pen, and why writer's cramp was not as serious a problem before typewriters and computers as we might suppose it was, by how frequently we tend to induce cramp on ourselves.