Schooltraq Organizes Your Entire Academic Calendar

Schooltraq is an awesome new way to keep traq (ohsoclever) of all of your assignments.I have featured my way of keeping up with my school assignments on HackCollege before. It involves being incredibly diligent, organized, consistent, and OCD. I happen to be all of those things. However, I would never expect any huge amount of college students to follow my example because of the craziness that it takes to organize a schedule the way I do. Thankfully, there's Schooltraq, which probably understands students' needs because it was actually created by students.

Schooltraq is a new online way to organize your school assignments in a way that is simplistic and doesn't make you want to pull out your hair every time you schedule something in. Essentially, you enter your classes for the semester and color code them (music to my ears). Then, every so often (I would recommend at least every week, but it's probably more effective to do it every month or even to go by the semester), you type in your homework assignments. This is usually when online to do lists and the way I organize my calendar gets extremely tedious. I mean, who wants to type in every freaking assignment you have to do this semester?

One of the really neat features that Schooltraq offers is that you can type in assignments with what the call "Reflex." Instead of typing in an assignment name in one box, the specific class in another, and the due date in another box, you can simply type in "Read Chapter Nine Biology next thursday." Schooltraq uses Reflex as a natural language parser to understand that the assignment is to read chapter nine for biology, and it's due next Thursday. All you have to do is press enter, and bam, it's on your academic calendar. This makes entering homework assignments a lot easier, and the natural language parser works pretty darn well.

You can also check assignments off after you've done them (as you can see above). The website keeps your assignments in order of their due date so you can see which assignment you need to do next. Although that is really important, I still strongly, strongly recommend mapping out really important assignments on a traditional calendar so you can plan out your time to work on major projects and be in the situation where you have two days to write a 20 page research paper.

Whether or not Schooltraq will catch on as a leading way to organize students' lives I think depends on the availablity of it on smartphones. A lot of students use Google Calendar to organize their lives, and so in order to become competitive enough to get a lot of notice depends on its accessability. I'm hopeful and I think that as the site develops, it will be a great tool for students.

If you'd like to check out Schooltraq, head over to their website. Schooltraq is currently in beta mode and invitation only, but Lifehacker offered an invitational code "golifehacker" for you to try it out right now.

What do you think of Schooltraq? What will it take for you to switch to it rather than use your current method of keeping track of your assignments?

[via Lifehacker]

Comments

[Ben Steward]

Care to, I don't know, actually link to it?