One if my biggest concerns this year so far, has been how to keep track of the what, when, why and how of her classes. I started this year by adding her classes after the fact to a Google calendar. The downfalls of this solution was that I would have to remember to actually find the time to put the classes into the Google calendar along with approximately how long we spent on each subject. Or I’d have to go back a few days later and try to remember what, when and how long and any other notes I might find useful later. I did this for about a two weeks and found that it just didn’t work as well as I hoped.
Next was scheduling the classes in Google Calender. With this though I often found myself changing when something was done and it was extra work to edit the event to put in notes. The syllabus was also a work in progress didn’t seem to fit, because each subject was done individually and typically ended up with a LOT of moving things around if I didn’t get to something on the day I had intended. The more I planned ahead the more adjustment I would end of making if things went off schedule. So not really much better and in some ways worse.
Next I spend some time designing a spreadsheet for Google docs. What I liked was that I could look an entire week (with the way I designed it), I could color code or highlight this or that. I had a column for notes next to each of the classes for the day. I could easily add field trips, or our things like swim lessons or park/open gym days. I had made each week a separate sheet, so I could plug in a weeks in advance in the from the Ambleside Online Syllabus. The classes that I do daily with her (or try to) I wouldn’t fill in more than the current week because they were most likely to need rescheduling. Then with the week overview see what I hadn’t yet done, so switch around classes as I needed. I found that I was leaving things on their scheduled day, and just writing in the notes as we did the class. I was ending up with it not being an accurate record of our various days (or attendance) and would still need to change the syllabus or at least update it weekly.
Then I found HomesSchool SkedTrack. Which is what I’m currently using. What I like: online, free, no due dates for assignments (so they will automatically move to the next day for that class if not completed), you can select what days you have what class on, keeps track of the number of hours and what we’ve done, has a feature for field trips, crafts, and grading. It also shows a list of what’s scheduled that day, which you check off items when they’re done. List your activities by course and then you just do them in the order in which you have them listed. It can do grading for the courses as well. You can load classes and/or activities from a csv file. Which can be helpful if you’ve already started the year and want to log everything into the program. It will do reports as well. It doesn’t really have notes
It might not be perfect for what I want, but I often have an unrealistically high list of wants: free, online, android app available, weekly as well as daily schedule views, automatically updating assignments, field trips, projects or crafts, grading, attendance, tracking of hours/days of classes, reports and to me it’s important to be able to view or update from multiple devices. One of the more difficult of my wants is the free I know, but I like many others I don’t have a lot of extra money just sitting around. While I might say it doesn’t have to be free, I need it to be extremely reasonable since I only have 1 child I’m keeping records for.
One other quick note about grading. For the most part I don’t grade my daughter’s work. But when I have her do worksheet’s I’d like to be able to keep track of the number correct out of the total possible rather than only the percentage correct. For example if she is doing a worksheet (or even the questions in Life Of Fred) she may only have 5-10 to answer. Say the particular worksheet has 5 questions but she only had 4 right so 4/5 which is 80% easy enough. But say her next worksheet had 15 problems she did correctly. By going by percentage grades her average would now be 90%, but she’s had 19/20 over all which is 95%