Questions and answers

LogRings is an iPhone app that helps you name and celebrate the learning that’s already happening in everyday life, and makes it count. Take a photo, add a sentence, and LogRings shows you the skills and qualities each moment reveals. Over weeks and months those moments add up to a private record of how a learner is growing, whether they’re four or forty. LogRings is coming to iPhone in November 2026.

Anyone who wants to keep hold of the learning that happens outside lessons. We’re a UK company started by a home-educating family, and home educators are our first users, but LogRings is for every family that knows learning doesn’t stop at the classroom door: families who flexi-school or use an alternative setting, families whose children go to school, and adults who want to keep track of their own learning.

Take a photo or a short video, then write a sentence of your own about what happened. LogRings reads what you wrote and asks you a question if anything is unclear. It then links the moment to the skills and qualities it shows, using our unique framework. Recording a moment takes about as long as sending a message.

It is how LogRings describes what a moment shows, in four sections: Skills, Behaviours, Contexts and Knowledge. A child working out that half of 500g is 250g while baking might show Numerical Reasoning (a skill), being Independent (a behaviour), Real-world application (a context) and Data & Measurement (knowledge). It describes how someone learns, not which school subjects they covered. We built the framework from years of observing real learning, and we plan to have it studied independently, so that it stands up to scrutiny.

No. Exams have a necessary place, and they measure what they were built to measure. But they are a narrow measure, and everyone’s brain is different, so one standardised test can only ever show part of a person. LogRings records the rest, alongside exam results, not instead of them.

Only you and the people you choose. Everything you record is locked on your phone before it’s saved, so nobody at LogRings can read your family’s record, and LogRings never keeps an unlocked copy. The record belongs to your family; it is not a tool for schools or authorities to monitor anyone.

Yes. You can invite other adults, such as a partner or a grandparent, and choose what each person sees. Tutors and coaches are on the way.

Yes, to read what you write. You always say what happened: LogRings won’t record a moment without a sentence of your own. AI then works out the skills and qualities the moment shows, and asks you a question first when something is unclear.

Everything you record is locked on your phone before it’s saved. The AI reads a moment in passing, to work out the skills and qualities it shows, and LogRings never keeps an unlocked copy. What is stored stays locked, and only you and the people you choose can unlock it, so nobody at LogRings can read your family’s record.

Yes. Every moment you record adds to a learner’s record, and LogRings lets you prepare a report from it showing how they have developed over time. The report is yours, to keep or to share with whoever you choose.

LogRings is coming to iPhone in November 2026. Join the launch list and we’ll email you when you can pre-order LogRings, and again on launch day. If you’d like to try it before then, we’re looking for early testers: write to [email protected].

It’s the question every home-educating parent knows, and we ask it too. When our son was learning to read, there were days, sometimes a week, when he refused to read to us, and Vikki had to quieten the voice that worried he would fall behind. Fall behind what, or who? When she stepped back, she could see he had never stopped wanting to be read to, or listening to his audiobooks, and his vocabulary kept growing. Then one evening in Marrakesh he read every dish on a restaurant menu and chose his own dinner. A single week can’t show that shape; a record kept over months can. Vikki wrote about it in Fall Behind What?

Far more than it looks like. A den built in the garden, the questions on a long car journey, a teenager’s first Saturday job, a cake that took three attempts. The thing being practised is rarely the thing on the label: following a recipe is practice at reading a method, measuring and adapting. In our family it has meant a daughter who finds a recipe, works out the ingredients, helps buy them and bakes without us, and asks us to leave the kitchen if we try to help. Not every day looks like a gallery visit, either: many of ours have a quieter rhythm, and some are plain boring. Vikki wrote about it in Before Reading the Textbook Answer.

We can only say what worked for us. We let our son set the pace, and stopped worrying about which method we followed, so long as he was enjoying the books. Books written to practise sounds rarely made a page-turner, so we moved on to stories worth turning the page for, and took turns to read them aloud, a few sentences each. On the days he wouldn’t read, he still asked to be read to. And the world did the rest: a letter on the side of a lorry, a sign on the back of a toilet door. Vikki wrote about it in Fall Behind What?

In our experience, a language sticks when there is a need for it and someone to speak to. Our children use a language app for about ten minutes a day, and talk with a tutor online twice a week, which turns the words into speech. The day our son went into a shop on his own and bought two baguettes in Spanish, he didn’t have the full vocabulary, but he had the confidence to try and enough to be understood. Just as valuable has been learning how to learn a language: each new one starts more naturally than the last. Vikki wrote about it in Willing to Be a Beginner.

Let them guess before they read. In a gallery in Melbourne, Vikki and our daughter sat on the floor in front of one painting and used its clues to work out where it was set, before reading the caption. Her guess was wrong, and that wasn’t the point: she was observing, spotting patterns and reasoning from what she already knew. Our son hadn’t wanted to come, so he led his own visit instead, and toured all three floors in the time it took them to see one. His way was no less valuable to him. Vikki wrote about it in Before Reading the Textbook Answer.

They mean the same thing: a child learning outside school, with the family taking responsibility for their education. Home education is the usual term in the UK, where we come from; homeschooling is more common in the US and many other countries. It doesn’t have to happen at home, either. Ours has happened in a campervan and rented flats, in markets, museums and other people’s kitchens.

For us it was a question of fit, not of school being wrong. Our children were learning well at school, but they are sensitive, and the rush of school mornings and the goodbyes at the gate left all four of us exhausted. We wanted mornings that weren’t a race, and time to learn together. Choosing to home educate turned out to be the first of many decisions that made us look honestly at what mattered to our family. Vikki wrote about it in That Life Was Meant For Other People.

Deschooling is the time a family takes, after leaving school, to let go of school’s habits and find its own way of learning. For us it took longer than we expected. When we started teaching our son to read, we copied the method our daughter had learned at school, flashcards on the fridge and all. It gave us the confidence to start, but for a while we felt we had to get the method exactly right. Only with time, and with no one watching, did we let him set the pace. Vikki wrote about it in Fall Behind What?

Unschooling is one way to home educate: the child’s own interests lead their learning, with no set curriculum. We sit somewhere in between. Our children have a few daily jobs, including maths, reading and Spanish, and beyond those their time is their own: for our daughter that often means baking, and for our son it has meant building, taking apart and rebuilding his Lego every morning. Vikki wrote about our days in Before Reading the Textbook Answer.

Worldschooling is learning through travel, letting the places you go become the lessons. It’s how our family has learned since leaving England, through France, Spain and Morocco, then Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia. In Java our “curriculum” for a month was Indonesian and geology: the children became geologists, watching an active volcano change from day to day, collecting volcanic rock for experiments and visiting the geological museum in Bandung. Our son ate an egg boiled in a volcanic pool, and he won’t forget the taste, the smell or the warm water on his toes. Vikki wrote about it in A Boiled Egg at the Volcano’s Edge.

Yes. We lived in a campervan for a year in Europe, which some families call roadschooling, then moved into rented apartments, and now often look after other people’s homes and pets through house-sitting. A few things travel with us wherever we are: a little maths and reading each day, audiobooks, and online Spanish lessons with the same tutor, whose familiar face has been a constant for the children. The rest comes from wherever we have landed. Vikki writes about the practical side on her Substack, from the cost of a month in Morocco to house-sitting with children.