I’d like to call your attention to some very useful ideas about scheduling students using Music Teachers Helper; these ideas were suggested by Tina in response to my post a couple of weeks ago. Take a look at her comments at the end of that post, Tips for Easier Lesson Scheduling. She even has PDF examples of how she does it.
The basic idea is to add your own categories, such as “available”, “makeup lesson”, “group lesson”, or whatever you’d like to track or offer to students–and then color-code them to make them easier to see.
For example, I’ve taken to listing available lesson times in a light blue that doesn’t compete with the darker or highlighted colors of regularly scheduled classes and lessons. This makes it easy for students (and me) to see scheduled lessons and classes without too much clutter, and yet if anyone wants to find a lesson time for rescheduling, they can roll the mouse over the light blue time slots, and clearly read the information in black and white, or click on those items for more details.
There can still be a good use for a fictional student, as described in my earlier post, because you may wish to allow new and unregistered students the chance to log in and select an available lesson time without a lot of phone- or email-tag. If your available times are global (for all students), they will show up in each student’s calendar, including the fictional student.
Again, if you have other ideas, please add a comment below; it really helps us all.
by Craig Tompkins — Tue Sep 11, 2007 @ 12:17 am
A more manageable way for you to do it, if you don't mind all the students seeing all the lessons, is to create one category for lessons from one school, and one category for lessons from the other one, and color-code them differently, so that kids can easily see which lessons are from which school. Then you can just make all the lessons be "For all students" at the top of the edit box for the "event". You could even select "require students to register", which would make it easy for a student send you an email saying he or she wanted that lesson time.
by Ed Pearlman — Sun Sep 30, 2007 @ 7:21 pm