Hi all!
I’m new to the Gibbon community and attempting to set the system up for a local dance school that I am a part of.
The software looks like it would mostly suit our needs though, being a dance school, our requirements are slightly different to that of a traditional school.
The one thing in particular I was wondering about is if Gibbon supports ad-hoc enrolments, specifically for just one class at a time, to facilitate “trial students”. In this scenario, the teacher could create a student profile on the spot and add them to the class, marking their attendance as “Trial”. This way we could keep track of which students have done trial classes, as we have a limit on how many they can do before they need to officially enrol.
Any guidance you could provide me on this topi would be greatly appreciated.
Hi @jonathan.schirmer Although Gibbon is primarily designed for K-12 schools, it is quite flexible, and I have seen it adapted for other types of schools like music schools and tutoring centres. Here are some links that may help give you some ideas as you get started:
In terms of tracking which students are “trial students”, you could possibly set this up as a different Form Group, as each student can only be in one form group throughout the system, but can be in any number of classes. Form groups are often displayed next to a student’s name in many screens, so you could use this to help track and differentiate your trial students. Student’s form group can be changed through Admissions > Student Enrolment.
You can also change any of the terms used in Gibbon to suit your needs using System Admin > String Replace. In this case, you could perhaps change “Form Group” to “Student type” or something else more descriptive of your purposes.
Since you may not have Year Groups (often called Grades in other school systems), you could use just one year group that all students are part of.
Thanks for the info, Sandra. I have had a look through those topics and they do help in regard to some setup for my case, such as timetabling. The idea for tracking trial students via a Form Group and using the string replacement feature is also helpful. I did also come across the suggestion to create an all-inclusive Year Group, which I’ve implemented.
Still unsure about ad-hoc attendance for a single class though. Is there a way to enrol a student into just a single class on a specific date, rather than all classes for the term/year? I had thought I might be able to use the ad-hoc attendance feature to link the students attendance to a single class, but that doesn’t appear to be so. I only want their attendance to appear on the date they conducted the trial(s).