Scholaric Grade Entry

There are now three different ways you can enter grades in Scholaric.

Background:
Grade entry has always been optional, you can enter no grade by marking a lesson as complete.  There is a shortcut for this by holding the CTRL key while clicking on the lesson in the planning grid.  This will mark it as complete if you have entered time for the lesson.

Grade entry has always been done by entering what I call a "Grade expression".  This means that rather than having a field for number of points and a field for the number of points possible, we have one field for grade.  This promises a lot of future flexibility in how we enter grades.

Up until now there has been two ways to enter grades:

First as a fraction - indicating number of points awarded and possible with a slash separating:

Note that partial credit is possible as well:

Second as a raw percentage - indicating a simple percent awarded:

Note that this is identical to entering as a fraction with a 100 denominator:

What's New:
As of today, you now have the option to enter your grades as a negative fraction - indicating the number of points missed and the total number of points possible.  Scholaric then does the subtraction for you.

This would be identical to entering 44/53.

Happy Planning!

Goal Tracking in Scholaric

Today I have released goal tracking in Scholaric.  Scholaric has always automatically tracked total hours.  This was useful for some, but users have asked for other types of tracking, such as:

  • Hours in "core" subjects
  • Lessons in some or all subjects or some courses
  • Attendance, according to various definitions of a "day"

Today's release provides this tracking, and other capability that you can customize to track against your local homeschool regulations or personal milestones. 

Definitions: 

The goal is the named statistic we are tracking, such as Core Hours.

The goal metric is the unit being tracked, either hours, lessons, or days.  Hour tracking sums the time entered in lessons.  Lesson tracking counts the number of lessons.  Day tracking counts the number of days that a threshold number of hours or lessons were met or exceeded.  Day tracking is used to track attendance.  For many of you, 1 complete lesson in a day is your definition of a day of attendance.

The goal target is the number of units to accomplish, in terms of the metric, such as 200 hours.

The current period is the date range you are using to track your data - either your school year, semester, or quarter, such as the 2011-2012 school year.  Goals track within the current period.  When the current period is switched, the goals automatically track in that period.

The goal scope limits the counting of the metric to one or more subjects or courses, such as Mathematics and Science, or can include all data.

A goal is applied to either a single student, or all students.

Goals Page:

A new goals page shows the completed, planned, and total values for each goal.  The goals page allows editing of goals, creation of new goals, and deleting of existing goals.  Links to the goals page have been added to the dashboard, and on the menu bar atop each page.

Primary Goal:

One goal is designated the primary goal for a student.  This goal is special in that it appears in the dashboard.  The primary goal is indicated by a gold star.  Primary goals may not be deleted.

On the goals page (not the dashboard) the various parts of a goal can be edited:

  1. Edit the goal name by clicking on it
  2. Change the metric by clicking on it - this will allow you to change between hours, lessons, and days (attendance).
  3. Switch between all users and the current student by clicking on the owner
  4. Select a different primary goal by clicking on an unfilled star
  5. Finally, edit the scope of the goal by clicking on the scope definition, which by default reads "Tracking all subjects".  This will allow you to track specific subjects or courses

Happy planning!

Sorting Courses

Due to your requests, Scholaric now supports sorting of courses.  To reorder your courses, use the course menu in the planning grid.  

Note that not all rows in the grid can be moved.  Some courses appear in the grid in spite of the fact that they have not been added for a student, or have been hidden.  These appear only at the bottom of the page.  To move these stray courses, first add them back in for the student.

The sort order impacts both the planning grid and the printout page.  Enjoy.

The Scholaric Badge

Bloggers:

Thanks to those of you who have reviewed Scholaric.  The Scholaric badge is up and available for you to place on your blog, to help promote Scholaric.

The badge is 125x125 and features our soon-coming logo:

scholaric homeschool planner

 

The markup for the badge is as follows:

Note: Please do not copy the image, as it will likely be updated over time.

Also Note: Do not use the "copy to clipboard" link above, but select and copy the text.

Multi-line entry for mobile Scholaric Users

Scholaric has been gaining lots of mobile users recently, particularly for the iPad.

Its biggest limitation has been the fact that the lesson dialog expands its title field to a multi-line description by use of the down arrow, and there is no down arrow on these devices.

This is no longer a problem.  Scholaric now detects a mobile browser on a variety of platforms, and automatically expands the title field for you.  The label is also changed to not say "Down arrow expands"

This new feature has been tested on the following devices:
  • iPhone 4
  • Samsung Galaxy S
  • iPad
If you have a different mobile device, please add a comment to tell me if this works for you, and I'll add your device to the list.

Latest Scholaric Release: Lesson Sharing

I've just released our first lesson sharing capability in Scholaric.

You will notice a new Sharing tab in the lesson dialog.  Lessons can be shared upon creation, with any number of siblings.  When editing an existing lesson, you can share it with additional students, or unshare it from currently shared students.  Sharing a lesson creates a new shared lesson, while unsharing a lesson deletes a shared lesson.

Shared lessons have a common description - edit it in one and it is edited for all those who share it.  If you try to edit a shared lesson description, you will be warned, and given an opportunity to unlink that lesson from its shared peers.

To support customization of shared lessons, you can also annotate a lesson, so it shows up only for them.  Annotations are not shared between students.

Other lesson information - scheduling, time, and score expression - are copied at the time of sharing, but are otherwise unlinked.

You may also combine lesson sharing with creation of repeating lessons, to create a whole series of shared lessons.

jeff

5 Quick Scholaric Tips

Here are 5 quick Scholaric tips every user should know:

1) Quickly mark your lesson as complete by clicking on it while holding down the alt key.

UPDATE: Lesson no longer requires time for quick complete.

2) Turn your repeating lessons into a sequence by adding a single numeric range within curly braces.  For example:

  Lesson {1-17}

will produce Lesson 1, then Lesson 2, then Lesson 3...

UPDATE: Now supports alphabetic ranges, as well as nested sequences.  See this post.

3) Make sure you set your default schedule for every course, using the course menu in the planning grid.

4) To change a lesson to a different week, click on the lesson date in the lesson dialog.

5) If you are in a daily routine of grading and updating assignments, grade your days lessons prior to printing out.  Scholaric will see that all the day's lessons are complete, and assume you want to print out tomorrow's lessons.