School Desk

At long last, I have finished the year-end PDF bundle. This new feature brings all of your school year activities into a single package. The bundle includes PDF reports of all the tasks that each of your students did in a school year and a lot more! In the bundle, you’ll get PDF reports of all the reports that are currently available to you on the Reports page. This includes

Maybe you want to change the ordering of the grade levels in your school year. Well, now you can! This is a very brief feature update. If you create your school year’s grade levels in an order that you don’t like, you can now adjust the order to your liking, just like you can with course ordering. You can find the ordering controls on the school year’s edit page. On an unrelated note, I fixed some horizontal scrollbar issues.

Happy New Year from us at School Desk! I’m very thankful for all the customers that helped School Desk grow from a seedling idea to useful service in 2021. I’d like to share with you what I see happening in the upcoming year. School Desk is maturing continuously, and I want to describe some of the “big rocks” that are coming up. My family runs our homeschool on the calendar year, so my wife just finished off the school year for our kids before we left to visit our family during the Christmas break.

When building a course, you can create many tasks at once with School Desk’s bulk creation tools. What do you do when you make a mistake and create tasks that you don’t want? You can now delete many tasks from a single page instead of deleting one at a time. This should save you some clicks and time if you happen to goof as you build your course. You can find this new feature as one of the action buttons on your course page.

School breaks can now be set for individual students in a school! This is a change from the classic handling of school breaks that applied school breaks to all students unconditionally. When our family takes breaks from school, we usually have both of our kids on break. This makes perfect sense for breaks like Christmas vacation, but having everyone on break at the same time isn’t always what we want.

When using School Desk, you may have noticed a page for a course and another page to show your student’s progress in the course. These pages were, well… confusing. In use, finding your student’s progress page was needlessly hard and the two pages overlapped in many ways. Now, the course page and the student’s progress page are combined into a single page! The combined course page replaces both of the previous versions.

Adding all of your student’s coursework in your school schedule can be time consuming. We want to give you some shortcuts to make common task creation actions easy. School Desk now includes options and improvements that should be a boon for school year planning. First, the bulk task creation page is now very smooth. As you add tasks on the page, new empty entries will be appended to the bottom of the page.

Keeping records is a fact of life for most homeschooling families. While you should still check what’s required by your local government for your family, School Desk wants to help where we can. To that end, we’re excited to announce the availability of an attendance report that automatically tracks your student’s attendance. For those of you in states that require attendance tracking, we’ve got you covered. School Desk has attendance reports for each of your students in a school year.

Where do you go when you want to learn more about School Desk? Now, we have an answer. The School Desk documentation is your destination for learning about the app. I want the app to be so simple that you don’t need a manual. If you haven’t tried it out yet, sign up for a trial to give it a shot! Sometimes, though, we want to learn things that playing with the app can’t teach well.

If you’re a new School Desk user, I want your first experience to be a great one! Once you sign up with School Desk, the app will guide you and introduce you to the important types of data that you’ll need to be successful with planning with School Desk. Why do this? I’m certain that most users will have no trouble with School Desk, but even a great tool can benefit you by providing helpful context.

Our new feature is the ability to show you the newest features! How meta! To keep everyone apprised of updates to School Desk, the app includes a “What’s New?” notification badge that will bring you to the latest and greatest news on this blog. I’ll announce big changes to School Desk that are noteworthy to users. Don’t expect me to spam you with trivial updates. I suspect you don’t have time to read about trivialities and, truthfully, I don’t have time to write about them.

Hello! I want to welcome you to School Desk, a new homeschool planner to help homeschooling teachers with their schools. At the end of 2019, my wife hit a rough patch with the homeschool planner that she was using. The planner had a clunky user interface, the website wasn’t secure, and the site would go down for hours at a time when she wanted to use it! As a software engineer specializing in web application development, I thought I could do better.