Music School Setup

General
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Hello everyone at Gibbon!

I found your software online and I would like to thank you for creating such an amazing system!

I am a music teacher teaching for a music school in the states. My boss, who’s also my friend, wants to move admin stuff online. Currently we schedule our teachers and students by hand on a notebook. We want to move that electronically so my co-worker and I can check our teaching schedule online while our students can do the same. My friend also wants to track these classes electronically so it may generate a report to send invoices to student’s parents. I know a bit of computer stuff and have setup a test server on my own pc. After setting up and playing around with smart workflow, I’m confused in assigning classes and lessons. I read in your documentations about timetable admin and I got even more confused.

To start, I know we need to setup school year which for example I have setup year of 2020. Next, I setup a course(Piano). I have setup 7 days a week with each columns representing each day (within each column, 15 mins slots are added as rows to facilitate some of our lessons are half hour and some are 45 mins). This is the part I’m confused the most. Since I have setup my course, in classes should I create different levels as classes (eg. piano lv1, lv2, lv3…and so on)? And what is the different between classes and lessons as shown in smart workflow? Does my friend and her secretary add lessons within classes as they receive new student bookings?

I saw from another post Gibbon can be integrated with google calender if user logged in with google credentials. Will that ease scheduling for teachers and students, aka just click on the timetable, and add a class/lesson, add teachers/students, click ok and they are scheduled?

Thanks!

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Hi siximig, welcome to the Gibbon community and thanks for your kind words :smiley: Sounds like you’ve made some great progress searching in the forums and documentation. I’ll answer your questions as best as I can, in the future it can be helpful to post these as separate topics, because it will help people who are looking for similar answers.

Looks like there have been a couple other people looking to use Gibbon for a music school, these posts may be of use: https://ask.gibbonedu.org/discussion/2265/adapting-gibbon-for-use-in-a-music-school/p1 and https://ask.gibbonedu.org/discussion/1065/setup-for-music-school-without-fixed-school-year-or-semester/p1

  • Classes are instances of a course, so for example Piano lv1might be the course, and if it was taught to three different groups of students, you would want three classes to track and timetable them. For small schools though, each course usually has one class.
  • Lessons are the materials taught on a particular day for that timetabled class. Lesson planning can be useful if its handy to have the class materials available online, however it's not required. To begin with, just getting your timetable and classes setup would be the first hurdle.
  • Your friend & her secretary would first enrol the student in the school year through Student Enrolment, and then into their classes through Timetable Admin. For a music school the year groups and form groups may not be as useful (unless you have different year-based progression for students). One way people have bypassed this is to setup one year group and one form group for the whole school. This will depend on the school's structure.
  • Google calendar integration doesn't turn Google into a timetable, but allow external school-wide and personal calendars to be displayed within Gibbon. It's largely there as a visual aid, to see all daily lessons and events in one place. There's no connection between the Google calendar events and the classes/timetable in Gibbon.

Hope this helps!

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Hi Sandra!

Thank you for your quick reply!

I apologize for not separating them as I’ve experienced in other forums I may be called a spammer if I create a post for each question. I shall do that next time!

Regarding to those two links, I have seen those as well but I mainly couldn’t wrap my head how to setup timetable structure until you replied me. Now I get the flow of it, that will greatly help us setup the way we want.

Right now I need to consolidate the year group into one as I have mistakenly treated year group as skill levels. My original test gig was like this:
Year group: Beginner, lv1, lv2, lv3 …etc
Course name: Piano All, Violin All, Guitar All
Classes within each course: lv1, lv2, lv3 …etc

From what you are saying, I adjust year group as one big group, courses will be listed by it’s own levels (eg. "piano lv1, piano lv2, guitar lv1, guitar lv2, violin lv1, violin lv2, and so on), and lastly, teachers and I will be assigned to each classes to the students we will be teaching. For exmaple, I will teach piano lv1, lv 2, lv3, so there will be 3 classes but each inside it’s own course levels.

After this is done, in timetable, my friend and her secretary will schedule when classes will take place. This is my next hurdle. I created a timetable in timetable admin and within it, I have created 7 days in “Edit Timetable Days”. Within tim

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Sorry, I posted by accident and can’t edit from my last post. To continue from what I said early:

After this is done, in timetable, my friend and her secretary will schedule when classes will take place. This is my next hurdle. I created a timetable in timetable admin and within it, I have created 7 days in “Edit Timetable Days”. Is that the correct way? I noticed in “Manage Columns”, I only created one called “Full Day”, which only has time slots of daily operation at the center, aka from 8am - 10pm with 15 minutes slots. Is that enough? If that is alright, I was wondering what is the use of creating more “columns” in “Manage Columns”? Is it for if in regular schools with some classes scheduled by the hours and some by minutes, so it may be more flexible for the person to import classes?

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Hi siximig,

Yes sounds like you are on the right track. A school would only need more than one column if they had different timings during the week. After you’ve completed the Tie Days to Dates then your timetable should be ready to start scheduling classes.