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.

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.

Juno Spacecraft's Odd Trajectory

The image below details Juno's trajectory.  Each tick on the path represents 30 days.  At first, it may seem odd, but take a close look.

Juno will be travel away from Earth for a year, passing Mars, and slowing down until it reaches its max distance.  Then it will return to us, using a combination of the Sun's and Earth's gravity to accelerate, doing a flyby in October of 2013.  Notice how much faster it is moving at that point.

From there it is a nearly 23 month journey to meet up with Jupiter, using the Sun's gravity to curve it as it goes, meeting Jupiter in July 2016.

Sometimes you need to plan ahead