Pick of the Week: Schoolhouse

12Aug07

This week’s pick is very useful for me personally, as it helps me no end to keep on top of my college work. I also like pieces of software where there is a transparancy between user and developer, it makes the software seem much more personal. It is for this reason that my software pick for this week is Schoolhouse. Schoolhouse is a homework and assignment manager that is developed and maintained by Logan Collins, a 19 year old university student from Kansas. While Schoolhouse is geared towards the US education system (e.g. Semesters are used instead of Terms, or even Years) it can be adapted fairly easily; I have two semesters, one for each year of my current study.

Schoolhouse has a very intuitive, very mac-like interface that can be learnt in a matter of seconds. There are two sides to the app, you can track homework assignments, due dates, documents and notes that correspond with certain assignments and the different subjects that they are part of. Smart groups are implemented superbly in Schoolhouse with useful defaults such as assignments ‘Due this week’ or assignments flagged as ‘Very Important’. It makes navigation much like moving through an iTunes library or the Leopard Finder. The other half of Schoolhouse is grade tracking of each subject on a term by term basis which can generate graphs with lots of useful ways of presenting the information (presumably to give you the best chance of making one’s grades look good, hehe).

There are even some neat features such as ‘Ask Tutor’ which as a toolbar button allows you to e-mail your tutor for a certain subject about an assignment (you have the option to enter a name and e-mail address for your tutor when creating a subject. And a new feature called Classcasting, allows one to share assignment details with others who subscribe to the feed (over several methods, including .Mac, FTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3). This would allow a tutor (or even a classmate) to maintain details of all the assignments for a subject and update students with one click.

There are a few small things that Schoolhouse is missing, such as the ability to copy and paste subjects and terms so as to save time adding the same subject to a new term (semester). But these things are only little niggles compared to the great features that Schoolhouse has to offer. And the best thing? Schoolhouse is free. It is donationware however, so if you can spare some cash for Logan please do (as I know what it’s like being a poor student!).

My overall score:

80%

Download Schoolhouse

Filed under: Apple, Education, Pick of the Week, Software, Technology   |  2 Comments