Reverse Bumping

UPDATE: See additional options for bumping earlier.

The bump lessons feature in Scholaric is quite popular, in that it pushes lessons back in time, preserving your schedule while skipping holidays and vacations.  Many of you have been asking for the ability to do the opposite - to bring lessons forward in time.  This has been called "reverse bumping" by many of you.  Unfortunately the names "bump" and "reverse bump" are ambiguous to a new user.  I have adopted the names "bump later" for the existing function, and "bump earlier" for the new reverse bumping.  You will see these both in the new bump menu:

Bumping earlier works like the inverse of bumping later: to use it, go to the latest lesson you want to bump earlier, instead of the earliest.  Select bump earlier from the cell menu, and it will move incomplete lessons to an earlier date, following their schedule.

One minor change comes along with this feature - limits on bumping.  I no longer allow bumping to proceed out of the current period, as a measure of protection for you.

Happy Planning...

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!