Timetabling and scheduling are where all the smarts contained in iUgo’s three planning tools come together. And they are where the rubber hits the road for most teachers. As well as needing to tick all the learning bases, your personal teacher timetables has to work within your school’s wider schedule. That means it must be able to accommodate school meetings, assemblies, co-curricular activities and unforeseen events (such as school closures) that impact your teaching schedule.
The ability to manage timetable changes is a popular compliance feature we’ve built into iUgo. You can use the Zero Day function (covered in our previous blog). This feature automatically moves your lessons and aligns how they appear on your Daily Schedule. Plus, you can record what caused the change, and why, in the app. This creates an auditable trail that you may review and/or reconcile at the end of the teaching term or year.
Allocating time equitably in teacher timetables
Another necessity of teacher timetables is allocating time equitably across multiple subjects or subject areas. Each with enough time dedicated to all the required curriculum areas. By using iUgo to order work simply and visually, you can manage your classroom programme more effectively.
iUgo also helps to balance subjects that require more brainpower with those that have a more creative or physical focus. You can achieve a good balance between theory and the practical – with an optimal mix of lessons to keep students engaged.
Another highly popular feature of iUgo is the schedule functionality. Its ‘week to term’ or ‘week to year’ selection accommodates subjects that you teach frequently. It also provides a range of lesson cycles to choose from such as 6+ days or fortnightly class rotations. This level of flexibility is very hard to achieve in a standard calendar.
Power of a single plan view
Being able to see your plan in a single Monday to Friday view is a powerful tool when you teach across multiple subject areas and/or classrooms. You can run a single calendar view with multiple streams of lesson plans and even multiple timetables within it. Better still, when you are using iUgo at a team or school level, you can set an ‘all school’ timetable that is available to everyone – minimising scheduling effort across the board.
In shared teaching roles – as is common in smaller schools where the principal may also spend time in the classroom – iUgo enables teachers to work with a common calendar. In this way, everyone can collaborate remotely on building the plans, scheduling and delivering the lessons as planned.
iUgo’s as easy as using any online calendar
iUgo has made creating teacher timetables as intuitive and easy as it can be. Its look and feel are very similar to Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar. Teachers constantly tell us it is very user friendly and most find it much the same as scheduling events in their online calendar. iUgo just uses ‘teacher’ language and is aligned to your school’s terms. Watch our overview video to find out for yourself.
One other big difference with iUgo is that when you schedule an event into the timetable, you can create a plan ‘link’ so all the unit and lesson plans are synchronised with that event entry. It allows you to access the lessons and accompanying resources scheduled in iUgo from the Daily Timetable view. If you update or revise a unit plan, it is automatically saved back into the lesson plan – no copying or pasting required.
You can also copy your entire timetable from one term to the next and then go through and update it. This saves a lot of time for teachers who have an established lesson cadence across the various subjects or classes they teach.
Check out this teacher tip:
How iUgo sets up teacher timetables to succeed
But no matter what you teach, or where you teach it, iUgo sets you up to succeed. You can access your timetable from anywhere on your mobile, tablet or laptop. Plus you can tap into another hugely popular feature – our big colour palette that opens up all kinds of creative possibilities in colour coding subjects and activities.
You will love being able to share your teacher timetables with others when you need to. And you will love the chance to have fun while you plan – and then getting to enjoy all the time you’ve saved to boot.
If you haven’t given it a go yet, try iUgo free for 30 days. You can sign up under your school or a demo school and be creating your first lesson in minutes. But don’t take our word for it – try it for yourself.
Check out the other blogs in this series:
