lesson planner and tracker

[brasilmom]

Hello,

 

I have been looking for a lesson planner for Mac but I gave up and it seems not to exist.

Now, I want to get out of the paper pencil planner and get it electronic. So, I see that a lot of people here use the Homeschool Tracker. I am not familiar with the program at all. However, I want to ask few questions:

- Does it allow for you to print week by week so you have the lessons and also extra resources you will need?

- Does it track hours and field trips?

- Is it user friendly to make changes?

- How does it work was for daily entries? If you miss an entry day, is that too difficult to go back and entry data?

 

Pardon if these questions seems too uneducated, as they are indeed.

 

Thanks for your help. Be well

 

Miriam

[sleepymommy]

Homeschool Skedtrack has been working well for us on my Mac.

 

The only thing is I don't think you can print the entire week on one page. You can print a page for each day of the week in advance though and then you would have the week printed.

 

It's been easy enough for me to make changes and it does keep track of field trip days, hours completed, etc.

 

http://www.homeschoolskedtrack.com

[MaMa2005]

Hello,

 

I have been looking for a lesson planner for Mac but I gave up and it seems not to exist.

Now, I want to get out of the paper pencil planner and get it electronic. So, I see that a lot of people here use the Homeschool Tracker. I am not familiar with the program at all. However, I want to ask few questions:

- Does it allow for you to print week by week so you have the lessons and also extra resources you will need? Yes

- Does it track hours and field trips? Yes

- Is it user friendly to make changes? Yes

- How does it work was for daily entries? If you miss an entry day, is that too difficult to go back and entry data? No

 

Pardon if these questions seems too uneducated, as they are indeed.

 

Thanks for your help. Be well

 

Miriam

 

Short answers. HST+ will let you do just about anything. The learning curve is steep so I wouldn't call it user friendly at the beginning. I've been using it since the summer and still have to look at the manual if I am doing something that hasn't been done in a while :) . You just have to learn how to program the different parts of each database. There are lots of different places for teacher notes, field trips, etc. You just have to enter the information.

[boscopup]

HST+ tracks just about anything you'd ever want to track. And if there's a feature you don't need, sometimes you can turn it off.

 

As far as daily entering... Easy peasy. Go to the student's assignment tab, click on the individual day in the calendar so it just shows those assignments (or you can select multiple days if you haven't entered in a few days ;) ), then just go through and click check boxes to say you're done with assignments, and you can enter the grades right there in the grid, or if you forget to enter a grade (if the assignment is graded), it will give you a pop-up when you go to the next thing after checking the completed box, so you won't forget to enter any grades that are supposed to be there.

 

Changing things around is pretty easy. Here's an example... I put all my lesson plans in over the holidays. We started school last week for the first time. Obviously, there will be a lot of tweaking going on as we figure out where we are and what fits us. In math, I figured out that we needed to move on past a few chapters. I only submit assignments to the assignment grid once a week, but all my lesson plans are entered, so I can just select however many assignments are done per week and submit them (it will put them on the correct days if I do a subject only on MWF or something like that). So when I changed my math around, I just deleted it from the assignment grid, submitted the new assignments that we ended up doing, and went on our merry way. Just took me a few minutes to do. I also marked the skipped chapters as "used" so they wouldn't show up in the list of assignments we still need to do.

 

This week, I changed spelling programs. I had both spelling program lesson plans entered (I had imported both of them from the HST+ yahoogroups). The one I switched to had been archived so it wouldn't show up in my lesson plan list. I deleted the assignments from the old spelling program, removed them from the current lesson plan, unarchived the new spelling program, copied those assignments to the current lesson plan, and submitted this week's assignments, both the ones we'd done already and the ones we intended to do. It took about 5 minutes to completely change my spelling program lesson plans and weekly assignments. In fact, it took me longer to type this post than to do all of the changes described herin. :D

 

I think the learning curve of HST+ for me was mostly figuring out what system I wanted to use for subjects/courses/lesson plans. Once I got that worked out, entering the data was very easy (note: I am a software developer, so I tend to figure out software fairly easily). Daily use is very simple, and if I don't mark assignments as complete until the end of the week, it's ok. It doesn't mark my child absent (like Homeschool Sked Track did). It just doesn't mark my child as present until I say he completed an assignment. I have to report attendance. It gives options for counting hours or not (I don't have to, so I have the hours thing turned off). It also gives the option of automatically counting attendance or not. It's a very powerful and flexible piece of software.

 

Oh, and I print out daily task lists each week, but you can also print out weekly lists in a variety of formats. I think there are screen shots on the website that show some of the "reports" you can do.