We just finished up the newest version of GradeMate and it went live this morning. Most of the changes were behind-the-scenes improvements, but there are a lot of great new features we added for you. Here are a few:

• Hide old assignments from your Upcoming Assignments list on your Dashboard
• Rewrote and remodeled the Help Topics
• Drag and reorder the courses in the File Manager
• Each course now has its own settings page where you can customize new aspects of your courses
• Assignment types are fully configurable - change names, weights, and even colors!
• Added a feature request page for all of your ideas
• Changed the visuals and added nicer graphics

And many, many more. Soon we’ll be adding more languages to the GradeMate application. If you know another language and would be willing to help out a great cause, send us an email at help@mygrademate.com with your information.

Feel free to browse the Help Topics for more information on the new features. Enjoy!

Deciding what courses you should register for is almost as stressful as working through the courses themselves. You could be signing yourself up for an easy A or a semester of hard work and tough grading. Through my collegiate experiences as a student and my work as an educator I have picked up a few tips for choosing the courses that will fit you best.

Get Requirements Out Of The Way. No matter what major, minor, or certificate you are working towards you are going to have required courses. Most programs have courses set in a particular order that you can’t really stray from but there are usually a few choices that you can make. The natural tendency is to put off harder courses or ones with a teacher you do not like. My advice it to get required courses done early. No one wants their last semester of senior year to be the toughest. Bite the bullet and do the things you have to do as soon as possible. This will allow you to do the things you want to later on.

Study What You Are Interested In. When choosing classes you should look for the classes that you have an interest in. That may sound like common sense but you would be surprised how many people end up in courses they heard were easy over courses that actually interest them. Even if one course is much more work than another, as long as you are interested in the material you will have more motivation to do the work. When someone chooses a course based on how easy it is to get a good grade their only motivation is getting that grade. When you choose a course based on interest you are more likely to learn and retain information because your motivation is to understand the material.

Find Professors That You Like. As soon as you step foot on campus for your first semester you should start looking for professors that you really click with. This could be someone who is entertaining during class, is very knowledgeable about the things you are interested in, has the same kind of personality as you, is a role model for you, or for any reason you really like. If you can find a professor that you want to listen to for any of those reasons you will look forward to class, put more effort into course work because you don’t want to disappoint him or her, think more about the material on your own, and learn more about the subject. It doesn’t matter whether this professor teaches something in your major or they teach a course that you won’t get any credit for. If you find a professor that you like and you can some how take their class, do it. You will learn more than in any other class and you will enjoy it much more.

Critically Consider Other People’s Advice. This may sound hypocritical because this post is intended to be advice, but you should carefully consider anything that someone else tells you. If you are interested in the material for a course and like the professor but your friend says not to take it because its hard and not fun you must carefully consider the situation. Not everyone is interested in the same material as you and not everyone likes the same professors as you. Maybe your friend got a bad grade on a test and holds it against the professor, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take the course. You will never know what a class is like until you take it but you must be a bit skeptical about what other people tell you.

Make The Best Of What You Have. No matter what you do you will probably end up with a professor or class that you don’t really enjoy. If you get upset about it and spend all your time complaining you will be miserable, you won’t learn anything, and you’ll probably get a bad grade. Some times you just have to buckle down and work your way through a tough course. If you try to have a positive attitude about things they will be easier to get though. It may be tough but learning isn’t meant to come easy.

Hopefully you found some of this advice useful. I know creating your schedule can sometimes be a nightmare but as long as you try to keep a positive outlook you’ll never have it too bad. Good Luck!

There hasn’t been many feature updates lately because we’ve been fast at work rebuilding the service from the ground-up. The new system running GradeMate (which will hopefully be up by the end of the month) will allow us to create new features and updates to the site amazingly fast. With that, we’ll be adding a feature request form to the site and maybe eventually a discussion forum. Bear with us for the next few weeks, we’re sure the new and improved GradeMate will be awesome.

The newest version of GradeMate was released today, and with it came a new File Manager. You can use the file manager to keep all of you course and assignment files organized and viewable in one convenient place. Uploading, downloading, and removing your files just got a lot easier. And as always, you get unlimited file storage space.

In the next couple weeks we’ll be working on letting you create your own assignment types in addition to the ones we provide. This will help you keep yourself organized the way you want to. Also, we’ll be introducing a new feature we’re really excited about - Groups and Project Pages. I’ll post an article soon going more in depth into this later, but Project pages will be a publicly accessible page for anyone you might be working in a group on a project with where you can share notes, files, to-dos and much more. Better still, there will be a message wall where you can add messages from your phone or email and even have them sent directly to all members of your team.

Finally, we’re looking for a few writers for the GradeMate Blog. We’d like to get some good articles on a consistent basis together with the GradeMate application. If you’re interested, navigate here.

We experienced a little downtime last night and into this morning between 1am Feb 8th through about 2pm Feb 9th EST. We’re really sorry for any inconveniences this may have caused you. Our web host was moving the servers that GradeMate is hosted on last night, and it went a little longer than expected. We’ll keep you updated for any future downtimes.

Taking notes during class is an important part of any course. Whether the instructor writes everything down on the board or does no writing at all, you should be jotting down notes as you go. A lot of times we take notes that really don’t explain anything. Just about everyone has gone to their notebook to study for a test and found that the notes they took are disjoint or just don’t help to explain the material. Many times you understand something during class and jot down a quick note but by the time you go back to study you forget the details.

Split page note taking is a technique that allows you to take two different sets of notes for the same information. It is incredibly simple to do and can yield incredible results. The basic idea is to take a normal sheet of paper that you would take notes on and split it with a vertical line. Some people split the page in half where others leave a space no bigger than the margin on the page. Each person determines how they want to split the page based on their experience using the system.

On the right side of the vertical line you take notes just as you normally would. In math and science classes you would work through problems on this side as well. The left side of the vertical line is for you to comment on the notes you just took. Here are some examples of what the left side of the page can be used for:

• Clarify remarks and summaries of the notes
• Comments indicating important points
• Explanation of how a problem was done step by step
• Questions about things that are unclear as reminders to ask the teacher or do more to clarify
• Rewording of notes the teacher gave that may not be clear

Say your instructor writes down a word and gives you a specific definition they would like you to remember. This will go on the right side of the page. On the left side of the page, just next to this definition, you should write a definition in your own words or an example that helps to make sense of the definition.

If you are working through a complicated math or science problem you can work through the steps on the right side of the line and the explanation of each step or where numbers came from can go on the left side. This helps you to not only follow the math and formulas used in a complicated problem but to understand why they were used as well.

Split page note taking really allows you to personalize your notes and make your notebook more efficient. The amount of space on every page of the notebook that is saved for special notes will most likely be more beneficial to you than the original notes. Many people have a very difficult time taking good notes but practicing this technique will eventually lead you to better note taking.

With the new release of v0.9.6 GradeMate gets a little bit older and a lot a bit better. Users can now set ‘assignment weights’ to their courses. For example, if you know homeworks will be 40% of your grade and tests will be 60%, you can set that for your course so you never have to worry about entering a weight for an assignment again. GradeMate will simply adjust the weight per assignment based on the number that you currently have.

It’s a much more convenient way to approach Grades, so check it out and let us know what you think. The Grades page also got a facelift with a great new user interface. All of your grades can be edited quickly and easily just like a spreadsheet.

GradeMate was featured today in LifeHack.org’s Ultimate Student Resource List along with two other services in their ‘11 online tools that students should check out’. Nothing greater than a little nod from a wonderful site. There’s some great resources they mention in their article, its worth taking a look at for anyone looking to add a little more organization in their life.

GradeMate went through a much anticipated update today with the new beta release of version 0.9.5. Now users can choose which type of assignment they create, be it homework, test, lab whatever. Also, assignments have their own individual pages where you can add assignment specific notes or upload files for that item. Hopefully, this will allow you to be a little more organized and have more control over specific assignments.

Not only that, but we’re preparing for the next release which will see a complete makeover of the Grades page. You can expect more updates on that in the next post.

Some of the things that are keeping us busy right now:

1. Fixing all of the time zone issues. Right now, if you signed up before we released that feature and have not set your time zone, there could be some display issues for assignment due dates.
2. Updating the site tour and adding video demonstrations of using some GradeMate features.
3. Setting up e-mail and text message reminders in conjunction with the reminders you can add on GradeMate.
4. Letting you have the option to share your reminders on your Public Page as well.
5. Fixing up some small usability quirks in the Shared page settings and adding a course pages.

Thats about it. Once we clean up the site we’re going to go full blast at releasing a Calendar. Hopefully it will be out early 2008.