How does Ella help students plan schoolwork?

Ella automatically schedules which schoolwork students should work on each day and notifies students during study halls, after school and on weekends that they should get started on that work.

To do this, Ella starts by doing something no other Learning Management System (LMS) does. It allows teachers to create both assignments (which all LMS's do) AND tests (exams and quizzes, which NO other LMS does). Each time a teacher plans an assignment, Ella creates a task for all students to which that assignment is given to complete the assignment. That's no different than other LMS's. What's different is that when teachers plan a test, Ella automatically creates a task for all students who will take the test to study for that test.

Teachers must also put in an estimated time to complete all assignments and to study for all tests so that students know how long the teacher things work will take. We know... we know... teachers are often wrong, but at least you have a starting point to plan how much time you need to do your work each day and you can self-adjust the estimates if you think the teacher is wrong.

Once the teacher plans your assignments and tests, Ella creates a task list that looks at tasks across ALL of your courses and then prioritizes your workload for you, looking at the due date; whether you're completing the assignment or test the first time or attempting it again to improve your grade; your current course grades; the amount of time you have available each day to work relative to the amount of work due each day; and more. Based on those factors, Ella then recommends what tasks you should do each day and, for large ones, if you should split the work across multiple days so you don't burn on.

The goal is to help you learn how to plan your tasks, but more importantly to make sure that you don't accidentally fall behind in your schoolwork and/or find yourself in an "overloaded day" in which you have more work due the following day than you have time to do today - something that seems to happen to most students every week or two.

As a student, you can change Ella's automatically scheduled work plan to meet your own needs. For example, if you have a large project due on Friday and Ella breaks that into smaller blocks to be done Sunday through Thursday, you might elect to complete the entire project the prior weekend to clear it off your plate, so to speak. Ella lets you do that. The automatic plan Ella creates is just a tool to get you started, but the goal is for you to learn how to plan across courses and tasks on your own with Ella merely showing you how.