What Can School Desk Do for Me?

As a homeschool planner, School Desk focuses on tasks that help you manage your school year. On this help page, you’ll learn about some of the things that the service can do for you.

School Schedules

How do you keep track of all the tasks that your students need to complete each day? You can let School Desk aid you with managing your schedule.

School Desk works by fitting your students’ tasks into the course dates that you choose for each course in a school year.

What does that look like?

  • You tell School Desk what tasks students need to complete for a course.

  • You let School Desk know what days of the week you want your courses to run.

  • School Desk takes all of those tasks and the desired school days and builds a schedule that is tailored for each of your students.

  • As your students complete work, the automated schedule adapts to tasks that you mark as complete.

Let’s say you want your student to do piano lessons every Tuesday and Friday. You could create the tasks in a “Music” course. The tasks could detail what you want to happen each lesson (or not! If you’re more free form, details aren’t required!).

Once you set the “Music” course to run on Tuesday and Friday, School Desk will automatically project every day that your student should do lessons for the year.

With this automated scheduling approach, you can see your entire school year planned out if that’s your style. You could also add tasks each day or week if you don’t like to be a long term planner. Whatever your approach, School Desk is flexible for you.

What happens if your student doesn’t finish a task on a given day? School Desk will seamlessly move that task to the scheduled day for that course.

Reports

Most homeschooling families have reporting obligations to show their local government that their homeschool complies with local laws.

School Desk provides these common reports. No report configuring is necessary. The reports are created automatically and designed to be printable directly from your browser to create a paper copy or save to the PDF format.

Progress Report

The Progress Report shows a student’s grades for a school year. All the grades are grouped by course, and each course displays the student’s average.

Attendance Report

The Attendance Report tracks your student’s attendance in a school year. Here’s how it works:

  • If your student completed any tasks on a school day, then they are counted as attending that day of school.

  • All your scheduled school breaks are on the report to show when your student has the day off.

  • Any days that aren’t part of your school year (typically, the weekend) appear for completeness and show that no school is running those days.

Resource Report

Each course that your student is in can have associated resources like textbooks, novels, workbooks, and any other class material. The Resource Report shows all of those resources for a single school year, grouped by course, on a single page.

Year-End Bundle

Wouldn’t it be nice if all the reports you need for your school year were together a single bundle for your record keeping? School Desk provides exactly that.

With School Desk, using a single click, you can create the reports bundle which will contain all your records for each of your students as a set of PDF files. This is a perfect set to provide to your local government to show exactly what you taught your students over the year.

Quick Task Creation

Part of building a school schedule is creating the tasks for each of your students. School Desk provides handy options to remove extra steps when building your tasks.

  • Create in bulk: School Desk includes a task creation form that will grow automatically as you need to enter more tasks for your course. You can stay focused on your course preparation instead of fiddling with website forms.

  • Task replication: “Practice, practice, practice!” If your students have tasks that happen repeatedly like music practice, you can create all of those tasks in one swoop.

  • Automatically number tasks: Maybe you want to replicate tasks and assign each one a number like “Lesson 1,” “Lesson 2,” and so on. School Desk’s task creation tools also make this trivial to add to a course.

Teacher Tools

School Desk includes a teacher checklist feature that lets teacher’s record notes about their students’ activities for the week.