The summer time is a great time to put together your schedule for the new school year. Whether you already have a schedule in mind (and you just want to put it together), or you want to build a new schedule from scratch, the QuickSchools Scheduler can help generate personalized schedules for all teachers and students, based on subjects that they are related to.

If you don’t have the Scheduling Module, you can actually add it to your Apollo Plan for a fixed monthly price. Contact us if you’re interesting in adding the Scheduling Module to your Apollo Plan.

Before creating your schedule, be sure to update your course offering. This is discussed in our previous issue of the QuickSchools Summer Series.

Creating a new schedule

Go to the Scheduling menu, and click on “Create New Schedule”. A new schedule will appear in the table below:

Be sure you have the correct academic term activated, since new schedules are linked to the currently activated academic term. This should already be the case if you recently promoted your students.

New schedules are called “Schedule – Work in Progress”. Be sure to change the name when editing the schedule. The academic term for the schedule is displayed below the schedule name for your verification.

To begin making changes, just click on “Edit”, and you’ll see the screen below:

Editing a schedule

Once you’ve opened the schedule, you’ll have several options available to you:

Edit the schedule name and description: Just click on the “Edit” link next to the schedule name to change the name and description.

Customize the period structure: After clicking the “Customize Day/Period”, you can change the number of periods and days for the schedule. You can also label the days, and set the start/end times for the periods as well. Set and label breaks by clicking on the “Add Break” button.  Be sure click the “Done” button when finished, and click on “Save” to save.

Set lessons per week for each subject: Your subjects should be listed on the right. If you click on a subject, you can specify the number of single or double periods per cycle/week.

Each single period will appear as an orange “S” icon, while each double period will appear as a “D”. Scheduled periods will have a check mark displayed next to the orange icon.

Assigning Lessons to the Schedule: To schedule a subject, you can either click on the green “<” icon, or simply drag-and-drop an unchecked orange icon to the schedule on the left. To unscheduled a subject, you can either click on the red “>” icon, or drag-and-drop the subject from the schedule back into the subject area. You can also drag-and-drop subjects from cell to cell.

Additional Options: Once a subject appears on a scheduled cell, you can right-click for additional options. You can add a Note, which is useful for classroom info, or additional notes like “Lab”. The other thing you can do is “Pin” the subject to the cell, so that it never self-adjusts to future conflicts.

Handling Conflicts: If you drag a subject to a cell with a resource conflict, a warning will pop:

If you drag-and-drop a subject into a conflicted cell, one of two things can happen. If the original subject is pinned, the conflict will remain. If the original subject is not pinned, it will be moved to another cell where there is no conflict.

Preview your schedule: You can preview/download a class schedule from this screen. However, to view a schedule for a teacher/student, you will need to activate the schedule first, and access the schedule from the teacher/student record.

Be sure to save often. You can read more about the Scheduling Module here:

Step 3: Activate your schedule

Once you’re done, just save and close the schedule. Then from the main schedule listing, click on the “Activate” button. Only ONE master schedule can be activated at any one time. And the system will generate student and teacher schedules based on the subjects that the students and teachers are linked to in the activated schedule. Teacher and student schedules will be available from the respective teacher/student record.

Conclusion

So that’s a quick review of the Scheduling Module. If you have additional suggestions or comments, please share them with us. We’re always looking for feedback to improve our offering.

Have a great summer!