Now that it is time to prepare the timetables for the 2021-2022 school year, it is crucial to obtain timetables that ensure safe conditions for students and teachers in the face of COVID-19, and that the requirements defined in the covid protocol for your school are met.
In order to achieve this, a number of preventive guidelines should be tried to be followed. Some of the characteristics and measures that may be desired in the timetables are:
From Peñalara we want to help you find the best timetable for the next academic year to suit these new circumstances. To do so, we have provided GHC with the necessary functionalities to meet this objective. In addition, as always, you can rely on the best support team that will help you to focus on the creation of your timetable, as well as to solve any doubts or queries you may have.
In order to try to achieve stable living groups, you should try to minimise contact between them. To do this you can do the following in the management of your time frames:
Staggering the entrance and exit of groups helps to avoid crowds in the corridors and the presence of family members at the entrance to the school.
Having different playground shifts allows stable groups to be separated while they are in the playground.
Depending on your needs, you can define whether you want your school to provide class units on a split day, a continuous day or both.
Classroom management is a crucial aspect to avoid possible contagion. The guidelines for classrooms are as follows:
GHC allows you to assign a classroom to a group and teach all of its class units in the same classroom. Also, by means of classroom sets, you can group classrooms together to avoid common areas of the school being occupied by different living groups.
When setting up the time frame, you can allow time between class units so that classrooms can be cleaned. You can also set conditions of non-consecutivity between class units of different groups taught in the same classroom.
If the number of classrooms in your school allows it, you can assign a classroom to a single group to avoid changing classrooms between different groups.
Classroom capacity limitation is one of the restrictions to take into account when making the timetable. With GHC you can create sets of classrooms according to their capacity. You can also assign more than one classroom to a class unit, and have them taught by one or more teachers.
The division of groups to have face-to-face and remote parts has already been done during the last academic year. GHC allows you to manage this division directly in your timetable, so that the student has to know when to come to the school and when he/she will receive the class online.
Each group of students can be divided into subgroups and each of them can indicate the classroom where they will receive the class unit, indicating if it is a physical classroom or if they will receive the lesson online.
By defining different periods, you can indicate the rotational timetables of the students, to indicate when they have to come to the school and when they do not.
Making it easier for teachers to report absences and for the school to act quickly is essential. With the absence manager, all this management is simplified.
Both the teacher and the school may indicate during which class units or on which days the teacher will be absent.
The school will be able to see, for each of the absences, the teachers who are on duty or out of class and assign them as supply teachers.
At any time, the absence or substitution report can be generated between two dates.
Thanks to the capture of preferences tool, communication between teachers, departments and head of studies can be streamlined and face-to-face meetings can be avoided.
It will be possible to specify for each teacher the periods in which he/she is not available or in which he/she prefers not to have class units.
The head of department can assign the teacher who will teach each of the class units in his or her department.
The teacher will be able to reflect on each class unit his or her preferences, such as whether he or she wants to be a tutor, to be on duty, and a number of other options.
Adaptation to changes in criteria by the administrations or due to possible teacher absences are circumstances that may occur during the academic year. GHC allows you to adapt these changes to your current timetable in a quick and easy way, being the software itself the one in charge of finding solutions or warning of conflicts in manual changes that you want to make to guarantee a correct reorganisation of your timetable.