It's easy to enter your assignments into the StudyMinder Homework System student planner. This video tutorial takes you through all the features available for tracking your homework assignments.

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

Transcript for Video Tutorial 2

This is the second in the series of tutorials on how to use the StudyMinder Homework System student planner. In the first tutorial we created a class schedule. Let's take a look at that quickly. Clicking the class schedule button opens the Terms and Classes window. We can change the term here or start a new one. But let’s click the Edit button so we can see what we just finished. We added a term for Summer, Summer 2011, and three classes, English, Math and Science.
So click the OK button. Now we’re ready to add our first assignment. You can add an assignment from the Scheduler view, this is the Calendar view that you can use to see everything that you have scheduled, assignments study time, classes or any other events that you want to add to your calendar. You can also add homework assignments from the Homework view. Clicking the homework button shows you the Homework list view.

Let’s add our first assignment here. Click the New Assignment button and this opens the assignment window. Now from here there are a lot of controls that you can use to give information about the assignment to you're creating. The class menu shows English, Math and Science. Now these are the classes that we just created in our term for Summer 2011. Notice that is says Classes for Summer 2011, so we know that were in the right term. We’ll select English, and we’ll enter a description for our first assignment. Let's say "Reading chapter two." Now under the Assignment Type menu you can select what kind of assignment this is. This is a reading assignment, so we’ll choose that. But notice also in the assignment Type menu there's Tests and Quizzes. Make sure that you add all of your assignments, tests, quizzes, projects, reports and everything you do for a class. Add those assignments, and that way StudyMinder will calculate your GPA using everything that you have done for each class. The next step is to select the Estimated Study Time. Let's say that it's going to take us two hours to finish reading chapter two. The StudyMinder homework planner will calculate how much homework you need to do using the Estimated Study Time. So, think carefully about how long you think it will take. Now that we've selected the study time, let's go on and set the due date for the assignment. We’ll say Monday at nine o'clock. So now we have everything that we need here. We can click the Save and Close button and our first assignment has been entered.

Notice that it's displayed here in the homework list view. Now from the list view if we want to make any changes we can do that right here in the list view. Let's change the description to, "Reading chapter one", since this is the first assignment that we’ll be creating. We can also change the due date here. The calendar will open up. Once you have completed part of your assignment you can come back to StudyMinder school planner and make changes. You can open the assignment window back up by selecting the control under the Edit column. Choose Open and the assignment opens back up.

So let's say that we finish reading for thirty minutes. Under Percent Complete, choose 25 percent because that’s 25 percent of two hours. And now you can see the time remaining is one hour and thirty minutes. Click Save and Close and you can see that the time left has been updated here.

Now we may want to add a reminder to our assignment so we make sure so we don't forget about it. Let’s open it back up and click the Reminder button. With a reminder set we can now choose the amount of time we want to be reminded before the assignment is due. Say, five minutes before or anytime up to two weeks before. Let’s set four days before so we can see that see what happens when the reminder actually goes off. Click Save and Close. Now, when you click the Show Reminders button, here's the reminder. All of the reminders you have set appear here in this window. So you can select a reminder, you can choose to cancel it, or you can snooze it, or you can just close this window. Leaving the reminder there allows you to come back anytime, click Show Reminders and you can see what you want to be reminded of. Let’s snooze this one for one minute. We’ll set it for one minute, close the window, and in one minute from now the reminder will go off.

If you want to duplicate an assignment, you can easily do that. Go to the Edit column, open it up and choose Duplicate. So now we have this assignment here two times. There's our reminder. Let's close it. We’ll change the new assignment to "Read chapter two" and we’ll set it to be due on a different day, let's say one week from when the first one was due. So now we have two assignments and we have a reminder set for both assignments. So now, there's the second reminder, we’ll close it.

This completes tutorial number two, How to Add an Assignment. In the next tutorial we’ll talk about how to schedule study time and use the study time features in the StudyMinder Homework System.