Going paperless, huh?

You know how I was just talking about going paperless by using the iPad and all. Well, maybe I haven’t been all that honest with you … I need to tell you that… that…

I have a lot of trouble actually leaving my agenda behind.

It’s just hard you know. There’s nothing that can really replace my agenda in my heart;

it’s there when I need, it always knows what I need to do, I know where I’m headed with it down the road…

In my quest to go paperless, I decided that I would break my routine and stop being loyal to this paper agenda.

I am a Mac and iPhone user, so the next logical step was to try out the electronic schedule manager that comes with it, right? Well, I did, and after a month or so, I was so utterly lost regarding what I needed to do that I stopped using it. It just wasn’t cutting it; it was like my old high school agenda where it was so simple that there weren’t any way to be truly organized with it. I mean, it’s great to remind you to go to the dentist on Tuesday 8:00 in two months, but otherwise? I didn’t find any true advantage to using it.

After that failure, it started smelling a lot like freshly pressed paper. I had to find something else before temptation got too unbearable.

The very same day, I found iStudiez, and I never turned back.

Simply a few days with iStudiez lite (free), I knew it was what I needed. It would work even better for students! You can add semesters, classes, teachers, set up logos and descriptions, time, location, etc., for every one of them, and iStudiez will build your schedule for you. Plus, you can even make it pretty and visually easy to know which class is which with different colours for every class. It has many features, which are all  presented on the iStudiez website, but what I like best out of all the advantages that it has is the way your data is presented. Indeed, you have an assignment tab …

…. that if you keep up to date really make it easy to keep track of your workload. If you’re a student, when (if) teachers give you a relevant list of what is due when for the whole school semester, you can simply write everything down. If you’re a teacher, you can either keep track of what you have to do as a teacher, or you can also add the homework you plan on giving your students to keep track of and to see if the workload is doable and meaningful. Plus, as you can see in the screenshot I took, you can set up what’s due for when and it will, depending on your preferences, put your assignment in dark, virtually un-ignorable, red if you forget to do it and it’s overdue. Now, it’s quite impossible for you or your students to say that you didn’t know what was due when !

Plus, if you enable this option, it’ll keep track of how much you got for what assignment and give you a general grade, too! As a teacher, it may not be the most relevant feature, but you can still see the value for your students.

This is the overview of your calendar once you’ve created it with iStudiez Pro in the planner tab (we’ll come back to this in a second). As you can see, you can customize pretty much everything from the colour to the title passing by specific times and locations. Plus, if you remember from my earlier screenshots, you can link assignments to classes/type of tasks to keep everything neat and nice. You can also sync it with the built in calendar, so you remember that dentist’s appointment at 8:00 on Tuesday.

The last part I’ll walk you through with the help of this video is the planner section. Listen carefully, then you’ll have all the knowledge you need to start off this semester/year/rest of the year in the best way possible!

So, as you can see in the video or in this screenshot if you’re not a fan of audiovisual supports….

…the planner section is quite easy to figure out. Everything is customizable and you can create repeating events which allow for easily manageable agenda. Plus, there’s no reason why you should get lost getting to your classes, as the location can be added in! (plus notes, if you’re a mess with directions).

This pretty much covers the iStudiez pro application for what I find most useful, though there are many more features such as sync able and cross-platform features that I didn’t talk about. Simply try the lite version out and get back to me about it, okay ?

Note: If you’re not completely sure about my newfound faith in iStudiez pro, check out this post. It’ll help put things in perspective. Best of luck!