Hi!
I’m aware that this question has been asked before but it seems some nomenclatures have been changed in Gibbon and I somehow have quite a struggle wrapping my head around it.
Use case:
We are a small English language school and have different groups like ‘Kids’, ‘Teens’, ‘Adults’ which are targeted for age and level.
Each of those are divided in ‘Kids A’, ‘Kids B’ etc.
Students change levels at the end of the semester.
The school year goes from January to December but is divided by two terms (semester).
Questions:
How would I have to choose the ‘Year Group’ (6 months or 12 months)?
1.1 Are the main categories created in the ‘Year Group’ (i.e. ‘Kids’)?
What are ‘Homerooms’ and are those for the subcategories (i.e. ‘Kids A’)?
Hi @Xavier_Bit seems like you are getting started with Gibbon. Here are the answers below for your reference:
Based on your needs, since students change levels at the end of the semester, it is suitable for each year group to be of 6 months so that you can automatically rollover to the next level in the next semester. Perhaps, one way to do it would be to name the school year as 2024-2025, Sem - 1.
Yes, that sounds correct to name each Year Group as the main category (Kids, Teens, Adults).
Home room or Form groups represent the same thing. You can think of them as sub-groups or sections for each grade. In your case, the form groups could be named as Kids A, Kids B, etc. You can also use String Replacement if you wish to name it as something else other than the standard home room or form group.
Houses are made up of students from different grades who mainly compete against each other to earn points, especially during sports events. If you’re familiar with Harry Potter, you can think of these houses like Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin.
Roles represent the different entities in a school such as students, teachers, support staff, parents and admins. Each role has specific role-based permissions in what they can access and do in Gibbon.
You can create new department types like “IT” by navigating to School Admin → Manage Departments → Add. In this way, you can create any new department and assign staff to it.
You can create a new course and add multiple classes to it. For instance, Course - Year 7 History and you can have four classes under it and assign different sections to different class.
Thanks for your answers, I’m glad you help me to get the basics down. In the meantime I had E-Mail contact with Ross and he offered me to have a closer look at our setup.
Nevertheless, I’m still eager to learn more about Gibbon and how to set it up!
If I may, I’ll split me thoughts and the progress we made into the answers you gave. Please be so kind and let me know if I’m having a thought error!
If I understand it correctly, the ‘School Year’ is determined on when the students move on. In our case, this is normally after 6 months (a semester). So what I did, I divided the school year into two parts, i.e. 2025.1 and 2025.2 with a duration of 6 months each:
1.1 I figured out that the ‘main categories’ i.e. classes aren’t created in the year groups. As it seems those go into ‘Homerooms’. At the moment I created them there and it seems to work when enrolling a new student:
You helped me a great time when comparing ‘Houses’ with Harry Potter. This isn’t really necessary for our little school and I hope I can just ignore it?
4 / 5. I understood the roles and I have created an IT department. Thank you for your explanation.
I’m looking forward getting this going and helping the school to shrink administration time and costs as we are running on a very tight budget, trying to keep the prices down and offer better accessibility for our students.
Hi @Xavier_Bit I think you are moving in the right direction. You have probably used the string replacement function to rename “Form Groups” to “Homerooms”. Form Groups can also work as classes as they are meant to distribute the students of the same year into different sections. So far it looks good. Good Luck!!