Wiring it up
The whole setup is one address copied out of Schoology. Your password is never involved: what you are handing over is a read-only feed, and you can invalidate it from inside Schoology whenever you feel like it.
Switch the export on
In Schoology, open Calendar and click the cog in the corner. Look for iCal Feed — a few schools label it Export instead. If there is a toggle, flip it.
Grab the address
You will be shown something starting webcal://. Take all of it. Anyone holding that string can read your coursework, so do not paste it into a group chat.
Drop it in
Scholarly asks for it on first run. From that point on your coursework simply turns up, filed under the day it is owed, and re-checks itself every few minutes.
One catch worth knowing: Schoology flattens every subject into a single stream and drops the subject name on the way out. Add your subjects under Settings → Classes with a keyword each — bio, calc — and the labelling happens by itself from then on.
Living with it
- Getting rid of things
- Hit the circle; a line draws itself through the row. There is an undo button in the pop-up for a few seconds, and ⌘Z keeps working long after that has gone, so a stray click costs you nothing. Finished work collects in a drawer at the foot of the page.
- Exams
- Anything reading like a test or quiz gets a second ring around its circle. Those never feed the number on the app icon — you cannot revise something into existence the night it happens. Once you have sat it, it clears itself out of the list at a time you choose, while staying put in the month view.
- Breaking revision down
- Hang sub-tasks off any exam. Scholarly treats them as due the evening before, which is when you would actually be doing them, and they are the one thing that never stops to ask for your passcode.
- Rewriting things
- Retitle it, move the deadline, file it elsewhere. What you changed is kept apart from the feed itself, so when your teacher renames the same piece of work a fortnight later, yours is untouched. The ↺ button puts the original back if you want it.
- Being reminded
- Give Scholarly your first lesson, last bell and bedtime and it works out the rest. Once school is over the icon starts counting tomorrow morning instead of today. You get one message at night if something is genuinely still owed, and a nudge shortly before a deadline. Approve each machine once and these keep coming with the app shut.
- Putting exams in your real calendar
- Scholarly will generate a private address holding every exam as a full-day entry. Point Apple Calendar or Google Calendar at it and your test dates sit alongside everything else you already track.
If someone else uses your laptop
A passcode covers your calendar address, the cut-off date and anything that deletes data; register a fingerprint and you will rarely type it. If you would rather not have an account at all, Scholarly runs perfectly well out of a single browser — nothing leaves the machine, though you give up syncing and any notification that arrives while the app is shut.