Anyone else up to version 4.0 of your schedule this year? I'm not talking little tweaks, I'm talking rip it all down and build it again. It's hard, it's draining, and most of all it's time consuming. So with version 4.0, I came up with a new plan. I was going to automate it. Rather than asking parents what worked for them (though I do love me a good Google Form for this), chasing down those responses, and then building a schedule, I used technology to cut myself out as the middle man.
We've gone from full remote, to the most significant kids being back in person, to two weeks of a hybrid version with a remote option, back to full remote. When we went from full remote to some kids back in person, I had to shift around students, then again when more students came back, and now I would've had to change some of the same kids for the 4th time. Since I see preschoolers who often need supervision from an adult, shifting these kids around only to shift them back when we return in mid January seems unfair to families.
I started this time by keeping my remote only kids (about 20% of my caseload) the same. I let parents know their time would remain the same unless they needed to change it (due to schedules shifting during other family members remote learning times). For the rest of my families, I set up a Calendly. I know you can also use Sign Up Genius, but I found Calendly to be more user friendly, and as a Google district, I could use Calendly to generate an invite for me & the parent with a Meets link. All I had to go do once it was set was to make it a recurring meeting on my calendar (which did the same for parent clanedars). Everything is in my calendar, I didn't have to make individual invites (though I did tweak invites to be the same link if they have more than 1 session per week). Game changer. Hopefully if we have to switch between in person and fully remote for the rest of the year, I should be able to use my v3.0 and v4.0 schedules with ease.
This worked for me because I didn't have to set up groups right now. As more kids get added to my caseload, I will add them to my current schedule, and work with parents on an individual basis. But if I did need to make groups, I might send out different calendlys for different grade level. Maybe 4 slots for my third graders to choose between or some slots for my artic kids in grades k-1 on a different (not overlapping) calendly than my artic 2-5 kids. I also know that my students will be doing their live learning from 9-11, so I don't have to work around live times by grade level. Some coworkers are just leaving their schedule the same as when kids were in person (if they were seen live at 10:30, they are now remote at 10:30). I think that works for some kids, but our schedule went from 2 in person sessions a day (AM/PM) to only mornings, and between daycare, nap schedules and sibling schedules, it wouldn't work for me.
Stay tuned for how I doled out instructions to my parents in as user-friendly of a way as I could without using my nightmare of bcc or writing individual emails explaining to them how to do it and how many sessions to sign up for.
What version of your schedule are you up to? How are you handling the changes?
