News & Updates

New Weekly Timetable

By Paolo Dona — Jun 26, 2011

Hello everyone, today we’re happy to announce a new timetable module that will make it easy to see how your week looks, and will allow you to quickly reschedule and change individual lessons in your calendar.

I’ll list its major features below to give you a glimpse of how this can be used for your school.

1. The timetable itself

First of all we wanted to provide a clear picture of all of the lessons taking place in a given week.

Go to the new ‘Timetable’ menu under ‘Classes’ and you will be presented with a new calendar screen that summarizes your scheduled lessons:

The timetable is separated by day and then further split into morning, afternoon and evening.

For each day, the lessons are then listed by start time, with the earliest first.

We have chosen this representation because, if you have many classes taking place at the same time, a standard calendar would end up being too crowded and unreadable, while this remains nice and tidy as the number of lessons grows.

Click on a lesson name and a popup will allow you to see and change its details:

You can change the teacher assigned to the lesson, the start time, duration or even reschedule it to another day – or go to the register to see the list of students who are supposed to attend.

If you change the lesson duration or its date, it will be highlighted by a diamond symbol in the timetable, as displayed in the image below. This will allow you to quickly spot where changes have been made.

It is like changing a single event in a ‘recurring event’ series in Outlook or Google calendar.

If you have a class with an irregular schedule you no longer need to create complex combinations of fixed-schedule classes, as you can shuffle lessons around as you desire.

2. Printed timetable

The printed timetable has been updated to reflect the on-screen version, so now is grouped by start time and no longer by class.

It includes more information than the on-screen version (teacher, room, number of students etc) and also features a different color per teacher, which is handy when teachers want to look up where they need to be next during the day.

3. Individual Teacher Schedule

The time table can get quite crowded if there are a lot of lessons, so you can filter by teacher to avoid this.

Click on the ‘everyone’ link and select an individual teacher from the dropdown list to view on that teachers lessons:

Click on the teacher name to filter:

This filtered view is also what your teachers will see if you grant them access to the system. They can log in and will only see their own schedule and classes, keeping other teachers’ data private.

Also note that at the bottom of the timetable there is a summary of the hours taught by the teacher per day, so that you can make sure the numbers tally up correctly.

4. Make sure every lesson has a teacher assigned

Some schools run classes in which there is no default teacher assigned. They rotate teachers so that the students can get used to different accents and expressions (eg: classes taught using the callan method).

In these scenarios, it’s easy to forget to assign teachers to the lessons, and not take advantage of the NiftySchool monthly reports.

We added a feature specifically to spot these lessons and fix them:

By clicking on the ‘unassigned’ link you can filter out all of the lessons that already have a teacher so that you can take care of the ones which don’t.

Once you assign a teacher to these ‘unassigned’ lessons, they will disappear from the screen and the ‘unassigned’ counter will go back to zero.

5. Other minor changes

Now that the teachers assigned to your lessons can be set from the timetable, the ‘Teachers’ tab has been changed to list your teachers and their average number of hour taught per week.

Another improvement is that the teachers monthly report has been improved to link to the teachers schedules.

We are excited about the improvements and we hope you enjoy these new features.

Feel free to get in touch at info@niftyschool.com should you have any questions or ideas about the timetable & have fun managing your lessons!