Using Technology To Simplify Music Room Scheduling:
A look at Google Calendar
A look at scheduling with Google Calendar
This is the Week view. The grey blocks at the top represent all-day events; the coloured blocks below them are defined by start and end times. Ms Yodel has room 5A from 10am until 12 noon on Monday, and again from 2:30 to 3:30pm on Thursday. Room 4A hosts two classes on Monday and Wednesday, but is otherwise free.
See more clearly with the Day view.
This is Monday in Day view. Bright, clear colours make it easy to see and comprehend details at a glance. If two blocks of the same colour overlap, you have a conflict. Simple!
Adding instrument loans into your Google Calendar
Each grey block for instrument loans is made by creating a new all-day event and setting it to repeat every day (excluding weekends, if you like). This results in a single, continuous entry that you can open up to edit and update names, instrument identifiers, contact details, etc, no matter what day it is today.
Google Calendar is free to use for anybody with a Google account. Calendars can be shared with different people and teams, and different permissions granted so that, for example, HODs can make changes, but teachers can only view the data in each record.
How did this Google Calendar article come about?
Education Direct seeks to understand the needs of piano students, teachers, and schools at a holistic level. Understanding how music departments operate, and where challenges arise, helps us to tailor our services to meet our customers’ needs.
Issues around resource scheduling are among the most common that we hear about. Room availability is generally straightforward, but tracking instrument loans across potentially hundreds of students can be much more challenging. Printed sheets and spreadsheets get mixed up and can overcomplicate simple processes, and become too time consuming.
Centralising your school’s resource scheduling into a commonly shared, always-online cloud service like Google Calendar is a simple – and free – way to dramatically simplify old workflows. We’ve put together some ideas and tips that we hope might help improve the ease and efficiency of your department’s resource scheduling.
Technology use and impact is different across different schools. However, for those schools who are still using older manual processes, we wanted to provide a low risk way to incorporate more efficient technology into the scheduling process. We hope that this Google Calendar suggestion(/example) will help serve as a proof of concert, or potentially a brand new scheduling system.
