Love the product, love the versatility. I have

[bluespapa]

Love the product, love the versatility. I have to make five syllabi this break for my community college classes in January. Three classes are MWF, one is TThu, one is Tuesday night. I would love to be able to generate a list of dates by saying MWF Jan.10-May.6. I can manually take out Spring Break and any other dates black dates. Or I'd love to go through the calendar and code the work C1 for class number one, C2, etc., put the assignments into the regular daily calendar, and when I've worked out my planning, hit a button, and have five different schedules produced with date from the calendar and homework from yours truly.

The syllabus part of the program works great in doing the converse of that so that daily assignments of the student (and me as I create the my syllabi) get entered on the calendar, but if this is going to be program for instructors as well as students, researchers putting together study plans, etc., I'd love to be able to generate dates instead of have to copy them the same way I did with a typewriter and a calendar.

Thanks for your good work and listening to your customer base.

[JeffG]

You should be able to create recurring appointments (MWF, Jan 10-May 6) that auto-populate the dates you want:

1. Creating an appointment on Jan 10.
2. Open it by clicking the small arrow on the daily calendar.
3. Click [Recurring...].
4. Choose Weekly
5. Check the boxes for M, W, F. Set your end-date and click OK.

This will populate the calendar with the appointments on the specified days.

For adding homework tasks, use the small navigation calendar to click a date that homework is due. Add a task on that day. You'll see that the task due date is set to the day the calendar is on. After you've added it, you can then drag it to the syllabus page and drop on the course. For easy drag drop, choose Window..View Two Pages; then Right-click syllabus and "Show on Right".

Hope this helps.

[bluespapa]

Right, but that doesn't generate five separate lists of dates with homeworks. I either end up with a calendar with Monday, Jan 10 homework for three different classes, Tues Jan 11 with two homeworks for two different classes, etc., which is fine for me, but not to distribute to the students, or I end up with it all on the "Syllabus" folder, and back to typing it out by hand to get an individual list to the students of one particular class, type another separate list to distribute to the students of another class. Unless there's some way to print off just one of the classes from the Syllabus folder, I can't print all the days there are homeworks from Jan 10 to May 6 for just one of the five classes, and another separate page of homeworks for course number 2, and a separate one for course number three. I still have to type out the individual lists of homeworks for Jan 10 through May 6 for each class individually. The syllabus page and the calendars with the tasks on them are wonderful for me, and if I were a student, for them, but I can't use GoBinder to generate a printed out list of all the homeworks for one class with the days they are due. I can only generate such a list for myself. I can drag and drop between the task list, the calendar, and the Syllabus folder, but I can't drag and drop to a blank page.

I'd like to see a mechanism that would permit me to get all the homeworks into the calendar or into the Syllabus folder, or both, AND distribute a list to each class of just their homeworks Monday morning January 10 for the entire term. At best, it looks like I'd have to do a screen snippet of each class from the Syllabus page to print one, but it would be nice if it were editable so I could add notes and explanations, instead of a .jpg or something. But I do appreciate the elegance of having the calendar and the Syllabus page so nicely integrated, believe me. I just want one more function, either off the calendar or off the Syllabus folder: the ability to generate a separate, printable, editable list with dates and tasks of an entire sixteen week session for an individual class.

'Tis the season for every college professor in the country to be sitting down with a stack of books on one side, a calendar (electronic or paper) on the other, and blank page writing out dates and assignments instead of dragging and dropping, cutting and pasting, or having the calendar program shoot the right dates with the right assignments out ready to go. I'd love for GoBinder to be THE FIRST program to answer this need. It's so obviously the right place for it.

[JeffG]

What you say makes perfect sense. Thanks for clarifying.

I'm curious, too, about whether you have the option of posting your materials online for the students. Do many of your students have tablets, laptops, or desktops? Do any of them use GoBinder? If so, and you do end up creating your schedule in GoBinder, you could export your course materials to a .pli file for students to import.

[bluespapa]

I'm sorry to say out of about a 130-150 students I have per semester, only about two bring their laptops into class to take notes. None has ever brought a tablet; they are fascinated with mine, but I don't have a good way yet to hook it up to the Proxima projectors in my classrooms (I'm working on that with our IT people), so the vast majority don't have a clue what they are missing. The bookstore at our college has had a T1000 displaying OneNote for a long time, but they tell me they hardly ever sell a copy. I always have students every semester who tell me they've never worked on a computer (remember this is a community college, so many are the first generation in their family to go to college, and many are here because it's cheap) and many use the computer labs on campus and carry their work around on disk or on flash disk. There is only one tablet owned by my college and it is used in the CAD and LAN labs (I teach English), and the only other faculty member I'm aware of who owns a tablet is also in English, and he uses his to draw, and hasn't been sold on either OneNote or GoBinder, and is using a beta of Evernote (which I find unusable for serious work).

I think if you can put some templates together for note taking in different situations, like OneNote has, to go with the different lined and graphed paper, students would appreciate the help in structuring their notes. But while some of my students own up-to-date computers, I'm amazed at how poorly the Tablet has been marketed to them, when it's so obviously THE machine for the student, especially now that there is GoBinder. Believe me, I will be showing my tablet and GoBinder everywhere I go, but nobody's selling tablets locally for the students to go play with. GoBinder has become absolutely integral to my work, and I'll be showing it to all my classes this Spring. I've only had a tablet for a couple of months (coveted one since they came out), but my students will be aware of what they could be doing.

One other note: I have access to Blackboard, but no IT support, and lots of support for WebCT (previous editions of which I didn't like). I think we'll be getting more support for Blackboard, but right now there are way more WebCT classes here, and I'm assured that the newest version isn't as onerous to use. I don't know enough about the obstacles to making WebCT integrate with GoBinder, but it would have more currency on my campus of 20,000 students if did.

[bluespapa]

I got long-winded without answering your questions entirely. I post much of my material to a website for reference or download, but everything on my website I hand out in hardcopy in class and tell them to keep in a folder. Now that I have GoBinder, if I were a student I'd want to have everything in electronic form, but none of my students has it yet to make available in the .pli file form you were asking about.

[JeffG]

Just an FYI, GoBinder also runs on notebooks or desktop or laptops with vanilla Windows XP, not just tablets, The recognizer is not there, but regular typing works great.

[bluespapa]

Good point! I'm definitely going to make this product known to my classes, colleagues, and IT. I was glad to read that the academic pricing is for faculty as well.