.. _timetables:

Modeling Your School's Timetable
================================

Creating a school timetable is necessary to designate when sections meet.  SchoolTool is designed to understand a wide variety of school timetables.  This, unfortunately, makes setup somewhat complex. 

If you plan to use SchoolTool for attendance, you will need a Timetable.  You can use the calendaring and resource booking without a Timetable, but you'll be missing out on the school-specific features of our calendar.  If you are using SchoolTool only as a personal gradebook or only using Interventions, you don't need a calendar.  Some add-on components of SchoolTool, like CanDo, don't require a calendar.

Set up Timetables through the web interface.  They can be exported and imported via spreadsheets, but we don't support users trying to type Timetables directly into the spreadsheet.

In this section we will walk you through one common example.  The most important thing in getting through this process is this: if you are asked to choose between something that seems obvious and something that makes no sense to you, take the obvious choice.

In this case, each class section meets either at a specific time on Monday, Wednesday or Friday, or at a specific time on Tuesday and Thursday.  There are three one-hour periods on Mon./Wed./Fri. and two hour-and-a-half long periods on Tue./Thurs, as shown:

   .. image:: images/timetables-7.png

To start creating a Timetable, you must be logged in as a member of **Site Managers**. Select the **School** tab, and click on **Timetables**:

   .. image:: images/timetables-0.png

Click the **Add: Timetable** link.

Give the Timetable a name.  We'll call it 3x2.

   .. image:: images/timetables-1.png

Our schedule is based on the actual days of the week on the calendar.  That is, certain classes meet on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, others meet Tuesdays and Thursdays, so we choose **Days of the week**.

   .. image:: images/timetables-2.png

Because Tuesday and Thursday classes start at different times than Mon./Wed./Fri. classes, on the next page we select **Different times**:

   .. image:: images/timetables-3.png

Now we enter the start and end times of each class on each day.  This form is finicky and wants the times in 24 hour (military) format:

   .. image:: images/timetables-4.png

At our school, periods don't **Have names** (for example "A," B," etc.), but are simply **Designated by time** (e.g., the 9:00 class):

   .. image:: images/timetables-5.png

If you designate a homeroom period, attendance taken in that period will be noted as presence or absence for the student for the day.  We'll select **Yes** to demonstrate.:

   .. image:: images/timetables-6.png

   .. image:: images/timetables-6_5.png

If everything has worked, you should see this:

   .. image:: images/timetables-7.png

