The first step in getting started with StudyMinder Homework System student planner is to create a new term. Then you add your classes to the class schedule for the new term. Video Tutorial 1 guides you through the steps. 

(If you are not using the StudyMinder school planner yet, download the free trial and follow along with the tutorial.)

Transcript for Video Tutorial 1

Welcome to the first in a series of tutorials on how to use the StudyMinder homework system school planner. In the first tutorial we'll talk about creating a class schedule.

When you first launch the StudyMinder student planner, a window will appear telling you that you have not yet created a new term and class schedule. So all you need to do is click the OK button and this will take you to the class schedule window.

In StudyMinder your classes are always grouped within a term and when the term changes at the end of your report card period, you'll come back here and create a new term for your new classes. If you have four report cards a year you'll have four terms. If you're on a semester basis you'll have just two terms.

Now usually the name of the term is the season and the year, although you can make the term name anything you want. We'll follow that convention here. And we'll call this Fall 2011. So there we have the term name set, and now we're ready to enter the start and end dates. If you're not sure exactly what the start and end date of your term is yet, it doesn't really matter at the beginning. Just put in an approximate date. We'll start this one near the end of August and we'll have it end about the end of October. So there we go. We have the start and the end dates set and now we're ready to enter classes.

Click the Add Class button and the first blank class will appear. We'll call this one English. Now we move to the Credits column. The credits indicate how many class credits you receive for this particular class. Now in high school you probably just get the same amount of credits for each class, in which case you can leave this as one. In college you may have different credit amounts. So let's say for English we'll get four credits. You can put any number you want here. The only difference that it will make is when StudyMinder Homework System school planner calculates your GPA. Classes with higher credit values will have a heavier weight in the GPA calculation.

Now we'll set the class color. This is the color that will appear in the scheduler window for this particular class. We'll call this one, let's make it Sandy Brown. And there we go. We've got the first class set.

Add another class here, we'll call this one Math, and we'll give it three credits. We'll make the color Salmon. And then one more class. We'll call it Science. This class we'll make five credits and the color Light Blue. So there we have our classes.

Now you can always come back and change the name of the classes or the credits or the color. All of these options can be changed any time. You can also click the Delete Class button and that will delete the class we just entered. Let's add it back again. Now we have not actually used this class schedule yet, so StudyMinder student planner did not give a warning message about deleting the class, so we were able to do that. But if you've already created a class schedule and you've added classes and assignments to this Science class, StudyMinder will give you a warning message. If you delete the class after you've added assignments to it, all of your assignments for class will be lost. So you'll receive a warning message. The same is true if you try to delete a term. Once you've added classes and assignments to your term and you delete the term, that can't be undone. The StudyMinder homework planner will warn you if you try to delete it and let you know that it can be undone. But this is a new term so we can change and delete it until we have it the way we want it. And when we're finished, click OK.

Let's go back to the class schedule. Open it up one more time. We'll choose Edit This Term's Class Schedule. And now if we try to delete the Science class it will warn us that we have not - that if we delete the class, we'll lose any assignments. So if we want to, we can just click No, we don't really want to delete it. Of course you can delete it. Just keep in mind that your assignments will also be lost, so be careful about that. Click OK, and now the class schedule has been added.

Now, the class schedule button - when you click it and the Class and the Term Schedule's window opens, you can change to a different term here. It's important to note that depending on the term you have selected here, that term's classes will appear in the scheduler. When you have created additional terms, they will appear in this pull-down menu. When you change the term from one term to the next, the other terms will be hidden. So if you are using StudyMinder and you can't find the classes you added for the term, you may have changed the term here. Just come back and change it to the term that you were working on. When you have set just click Change the Term and you'll be back.

So we've created the term now and next we will add an assignment for one of our classes that we created. We'll do that in the next tutorial.