The StudyMinder Homework System is a full featured school planner and scheduler you can use to keep track of all your activities. This tutorial shows you how to add your classes for the current term to the scheduler.

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

Transcript for Tutorial 4

This is the fourth in a series of tutorials about how to use the StudyMinder Homework System student planner. In this tutorial we’ll talk about adding your classes to the scheduler. Now when we create a new term, we click the Class Schedule button, this opens the Terms and Classes window. Let's click the Edit button. You can see in the term that we created for Summer 2011, we have three classes, English, Math and Science. Let’s close that.

Now adding the classes to the term doesn’t put them in the scheduler. Let's go ahead and do that. So when we click the scheduler button we can now see the calendar interface. Clicking on Today brings us to today, and one day is displayed. But you can show more than one day by highlighting a series of days in the calendar here on the left. So if we highlight Monday through Friday of the coming week, we see five days listed here.

So let's add a class now to the class schedule. Let's click on Monday. And if you right click on the scheduler, a menu appears and you can choose to add a new assignment, study time, new class or new event. Now classes are a special kind of event. An event can be anything that you want to add. It can be some kind of recreational activity, it could be your afterschool sports events, anything that you want to add as an event, you can. But classes are special kind of event especially designed to add your classes to scheduler.

Let’s choose New Class. And now when the window opens you can see on the right here a menu with the classes that are available. These are the classes that you've added to the class scheduler. Let’s add our English class. Now you can add a description if you'd like. We’ll call it “English Class,” and it starts at nine o'clock, and let’s have it run through to nine forty five. Now classes are something that occur more than just one time. They’ll happen probably every day of the week. So let's make this a recurring event. Click the recurring event button. Events can recur every day. Here's the Daily Options. So you can have them recur every day, but it's probably weekly. If you click the Weekly button you can see that you can have it recur on any given day of the week. Let's make it recur Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. We set the time for nine o'clock. Now let’s have it recur, down here are the range recurrence options, we’ll have it end early August. This is when the Summer term will end. So now we click OK and we're all set. Click Save and Close, and now you can see that for each day of the week we have an English class scheduled. If we go back to the calendar and highlight more, you can see that it continues on all through the month, and it will also continue on to the end of the term, which is early August. Let's go back to this week in the scheduler. Click the Today button and highlight the first week again. Notice here that we have an assignment scheduled that's due on Monday. This reading assignment is for our English class. Notice that assignments are not directly linked to the classes in the scheduler. You don't need to enter your classes if you don't want to, but of course the option is there if you'd like to. But it's not necessary to schedule homework assignments. They will appear separately. Not actually inside the class but they'll appear alongside the class.

Let's add another class. Right-click the scheduler. Click New Class. We’ll do the same thing now for our Math class. So we can just type in, “Math Class,” in the description. We’ll have this one start at nine forty-five and have it run until ten thirty. Again we’ll make it a recurring event. It will recur Monday through Friday and it will end at the same time that the other class ends, which is the first of August. Click OK, save and close.

Sometimes you'll want to make an exception of an event that recurs every day. Notice that all of these events have a small little arrow that goes around in a circle. That indicates that this is a recurring event and they are all the same. The only difference from one to the next is that it's on a different day. They all occur at the same time. They all have the same description. But if you want to we can make special cases out of them. If you double click on a particular one, we can open it up and we can say, “Math class assignment due,” if we want to make a special notation. If we click Save and Close, this class now has a different description. So you'll notice that the circular arrows now have a slash mark through them because this one is different. We could also change the time if we wanted to. We can open it. Let’s say this class got rescheduled to a different time. Let's move it down to eleven. Click Save and Close. Now you can see in the scheduler it's at a different time.

You also have the option of changing a recurring event which has changed, and make it back to be the same as the rest of the items in the series. If you right click it you can see an option here that says, “Restore Default State.” If we select it, it will now make that particular item in the sequence the same as all the others. So now this math class has the same description, starts at the same time. Also, by right-clicking, you have the option of opening this particular one or editing the whole series. So if we choose to edit the series, the start and end times are now locked. But we can change the recurrence up here. So maybe we don't really have this class on Fridays after all anymore, so we uncheck that box, click OK, and now entire series has been changed so that it doesn't recur on Fridays.

There are many more secrets in how to navigate through the scheduler in the StudyMinder school planner. So make sure to watch the next tutorial. We’ll go into some of the special tricks that you can use to make life easier. That will be in tutorial number five.