Your classes
Tap a class to open it — its line says whether today's attendance is done, and its chips say what is waiting on it.
Attendance ·
A cell starts on ? — nobody has confirmed that student yet, and until somebody does they count as absent. One tap says “I see you, you’re here”. After that the cell cycles present → absent → event → tardy → dismissed → back to present. Tapping one student changes nobody else; “Everyone’s here” is the one control that does, and that is what it says. Present is never stored — an empty cell on a day you have taken is present, and it is drawn as a P so it can’t be confused with a day nobody took. A whole column of amber question marks is a day you haven’t taken yet; a few of them inside a taken column are the students you haven’t reached, and the header counts them. A tardy or a dismissal keeps the time it was marked, under the letter. Tap a student’s name for their history, where the same time is written out and where a note goes — and where one student goes back to ?. The › at the end of the name goes to their grades instead. Past days need their ✏ before they accept a tap; today’s column is always live, and its 🚫 says the class didn’t meet. Every tap saves as you make it; there is nothing to submit.
From the keyboard. On a laptop you never have to touch the mouse: press ↓ to land on the first name, then one letter per student — P present, T tardy, A absent, E event, D dismissed — and the selection moves down the list on its own, so a class of thirty is thirty keystrokes. Esc stops it. The whole list is on the ⌨ Keys button above, or press ?.
Passes. 🚽 bathroom, 🏥 nurse, ⚡ quick — one tap sends a student out and records the time they left; one tap on Return brings them back and writes the minutes down. Three students at a time, and the buttons grey out with the reason above the grid once you are at that limit. An open pass is stored, not remembered: close the app, drop the iPad, come back after lunch, and whoever is out is still out, with the time they left beside their name. A pass changes nobody’s attendance — a student at the bathroom was present — with one exception: marking someone D closes their pass, and taking the D back opens it again.
| Assignment | Points | Assigned | Due | Entered | Actions |
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An assignment belongs to one class and one term, so this list is what is graded on and nothing else. Points, the category it counts in, and both dates are all editable afterwards — nothing here is settled by writing it down. A new assignment starts with both dates on today, because that is the day you are almost always writing it down on. Type over either one, or clear it and leave it blank — a date is never required, and clearing one leaves it empty. Nothing else is ever filled in for you. Planbook has no timetable and is not getting one, so there is no “next meeting” to guess at; a due date is a plain date you type, and it changes no grade and marks nobody. Duplicate copies an assignment into this class or into another one you teach — the dates come across as they are, and the copy arrives with no scores on it, which is the point of copying it rather than the cost.
Worth 0 points is how you give extra credit. A 0-point assignment scored 5 adds 5 to what a student has earned in its category and nothing to what was possible, so it lifts the grade instead of diluting it. There is no separate extra-credit switch and there is not going to be one.
One column at a time is the way this screen is meant to be used: type a score, press Enter, and the caret drops to the next student in the same assignment — so a class of twenty-five is twenty-five numbers and no mouse. It stops at the last name rather than wrapping round to the first. Tab steps sideways to the next assignment, and ↑ ↓ move within the column as well. ← → step sideways too, once the caret has run out of number to cross in the direction you press — the end of the score for →, the start of it for ←. Inside a number they still move the caret, so a score can be corrected without the mouse. Everything on this grid is , and nothing else. Every keystroke saves as you make it; there is nothing to submit, and Escape does nothing here because there is no dialog to close.
A blank cell is ungraded and changes no grade at all — it is not a zero. Clearing a score back to blank takes it out of the book entirely. Missing is the one that counts as zero, and it is only ever marked by you: nothing in Planbook decides it from a due date. Excused drops the work out of the grade completely, and late changes nothing about the arithmetic — it is a record you can see, not a penalty. Each of the three shows in the cell, in the fill and in a corner letter, because a score that silently isn't what you typed is the worst thing a gradebook can do.
The grade beside each name is live, and it is the weighted average of this class's categories with the empty ones' weight spread across the ones that have work. It can go over 100%: an assignment worth 0 points is how extra credit works here, and nothing caps what a student earned. Until the weights total 100% there is no grade at all — not a provisional one — and the banner above says what they come to. Nothing is blocked while they are wrong: keep entering scores, and the grades appear the moment the weights do.
Calendar
Who needs you
Both directions, side by side. On the left, what is most urgent: attendance first, then whoever changed the most. On the right, whoever climbed the most — not whoever is highest, which would name the same four students every week. Every line under a name is the rule's own sentence, built from the numbers that fired it.
Message templates
What a message says before it says it about anybody. Concern and praise are written separately, because a good praise message reads nothing like a good concern message. The preview resolves against a real student as you type, so a broken field turns up here rather than in somebody’s inbox.
Templates
Two tones for each of the four people you write to. Opening one fills the editor; nothing is in your list until you save it, and it is yours to rewrite first.
Preview
Fields
Tap one to drop it in at the cursor. These sixteen are the whole of what a message can say.