Along with the homework list view, you can use the scheduler feature in the StudyMinder Homework System school planner to track your homework assignments and other activities. The scheduler arranges your activities into a calendar format. This tutorial shows you the special features available in the scheduler.

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

Transcript of Video Tutorial 5

This is the fifth in a series of tutorials on how to use the StudyMinder Homework System school planner. In this tutorial we will talk about the scheduler. The scheduler is the calendar interface where you can add assignments, your class schedule and any other events that you want to keep track of. You can reach the Scheduler by clicking the Scheduler button in the top left corner. Below the scheduler is a calendar. By clicking on any day in the calendar you can navigate to that day in the scheduler. Dates that are shown in bold indicate that you have something scheduled on that date. Saturdays and Sundays are in red. If you need to see ahead farther than just one month, you can click the arrow below the calendar to see additional months. Clicking again will show third month and again a fourth month. Click the up button to go back to displaying just a single calendar.

The scheduler has special features that the list view doesn't have. So when you click on the scheduler button, an additional scheduler tab appears in the ribbon bar. Click Homework and it disappears. Click scheduler and it comes back. Clicking on the scheduler tab shows the additional features. There's a day button where you can show one day at a time. Click school week to show Monday through Friday. Click the week view to show seven days at a time, and click on the month to show the entire month.

There is also a special time line view. When you click on timeline, everything that you have scheduled for a particular day is displayed in one column. It's like a list view for each day. Now you can zoom in and out by clicking the zoom in and out button. Click zoom in and now each column is one hour, so everything you have within the same hour will appear in that column.  Click zoom out to go back to the day. Zoom out again takes you to the week, so every column displays one week's worth of activities. You can drag the scroll bar at the bottom to scroll through the timeline view. Clicking on any date in the calendar takes you out of the timeline view and back to the day view.

Let's add a homework assignment to the scheduler.  Let’s click the today button to take us to today and then we’ll highlight the upcoming weeks so we can see five days. By clicking on the scheduler and then adding an assignment or an event, the event will be added automatically to that place in the scheduler. Let's try it. We’ll click on two o'clock on Monday. Right-click and we’ll add a new assignment. Notice now that Monday two o'clock is to default time. This is convenient so that you don't need to change the time when you add a new item to scheduler. Let's add a Science class. We’ll call this a Quiz. We’ll set the type to quiz. We need to study for one hour, so we’ll finish now. Click Save and Close. Now the quiz appears.

This is an assignment. Assignments in the scheduler have a pencil icon to indicate that it's an assignment. There's also a red information icon which indicates that this assignment is not finished. If we double click it we can open up the assignment, check the Done box, save it, and now we have the green check mark that shows that it's finished.

Other types of items in the scheduler have different icons.  These are classes that are scheduled in the student planner and they have two people. Study time is indicated by a clock. Now for the quiz that we just created, let's go back and let’s uncheck the Done box. So now we have a quiz on Monday. Now we may often have quizzes for this class, so we might want to use recurring events. But homework assignments don't have the recurring events feature. That's because they need to be handled individually, because ultimately they'll all have their own different grade when you're finished. So recurring events don’t really work. But you can duplicate assignments and quizzes and any other events in the scheduler. You can do that by holding down the control key and then dragging. This will duplicate anything that you have selected. You can also select multiple items at the same time by holding down the shift key. Let’s select the first quiz, hold to shift key, select the second quiz, now they’re both selected. If we want to, we can be use the right mouse button and delete them. This will delete both. Or we can hold it, select them both, hold down the control key and drag, and now we've duplicated both. So now we have four.

You can also make changes from within the scheduler by clicking on an item and then changing it. Maybe we want to change this to, “Quiz on chapter seven.” We don't need to open it back up into the edit window, we can just change it here in the scheduler. It's also possible to change the length of time without opening the edit window again. Here's our math class. Perhaps math class is going to be a little bit long today. All you need to do is drag the bottom and you can extended it farther without opening it back up.

You can also zoom in and out on any view by holding down the control key and then spinning the mouse wheel. Here we are zooming in. Notice that hours are now much bigger than they were before. If we hold down the control key and spin the mouse wheel the other way, this makes the hour smaller. So we've zoomed out and we can see more. This works for any of the views, individual day, week or month. Just spinning the mouse wheel by itself allows you to scroll, so you don't need to drag the scrollbar.

This completes tutorial number five on how to use the scheduler. In the next tutorial we’ll talk about the special features available in the grid view, so you can enter your homework assignments more quickly.