Lesson Settings and a narrative for teachers

Click on any of the pages in the ‘Lessons’ menu and click ‘Lesson Settings’ near the top right of your screen

Answer the questions that show up in the various sections of this page.

1. Does your pull-out lesson schedule rotate?
   • If you answer Yes, the groups in your course load will be set to rotate through different periods each week.
   • If you answer No, your groups will remain ‘fixed’. Your Violin Group A, for example, will always take place during First Period each Monday.
2. Would you like Da Capo Inventory to take into account A/B/X days while creating your schedule?
   • If you answer Yes, you will be presented with an option to choose your A B C X day setup.
   • You can also switch the A B X day rotation by choosing a particular ‘date’ to set as an ‘A Day’. After you are done switching your A Day, you should re-run your schedule by clicking the green ‘Run Schedule’ button.
3. How many ‘days’ would you like to schedule your lessons over? In my experience, most programs use a 5 day rotation – hoping that students get a weekly lesson. Some programs use a 6 day rotation in an effort to squeeze in extra groups.
4. Rotate through scheduled days off?
   • If you choose the first choice, lessons will be set to skip over non-teaching days. In the event that you have no school on Tuesday, all of your groups would be pushed back a day. This means that you would not have ‘Tuesday Children’, as their lesson day would be changed whenever there is a vacation.
   • If you choose the second choice, Monday students will always come on Monday. In my school district, Mondays are the most popular day off!
5. Automatic Lesson Reminder Emails
   • If you choose Yes, you will be able to set the text for lesson reminder emails. These emails will be sent at 6pm to all students who have a lesson the next school day. The emails will be sent to all of the email addresses attached to a given student.
6. Would you like to copy the school calendar from a colleague?
   • One of the lesson setup functions is for you to set the dates that you will be teaching. Most schools have a 183 day calendar, however, some lessons may not be scheduled during the first and final weeks of school. Your colleagues may have already set their schedule, and you can copy it! After you copy the schedule, you can still modify your own building’s schedule.
7. Print QR Codes? (See Below)
8. Lesson Times
   • If you set times (be sure to choose AM or PM!), times will be displayed on the lesson cards and on your dashboard.
   • If you do not set times, Period Numbers will be displayed on the lesson cards and on your dashboard.

QR Codes on Lesson Cards #

You have the ability to create content that your students can view by scanning the QR code printed on their Da Capo-Generated lesson card

General thoughts for Elementary Teachers #

In my experience with rotating schedules in the Elementary setting:

• Some schools have fixed schedules. This means that Baritones are always on Mondays 1st period, Trombones are always Monday 2nd period, etc. If you teach in multiple buildings, I recommend that you set both of your buildings to ‘Non Rotating’ ‘Five Day’ schedules. While in your ‘Building One’ profile, set your ‘Lesson Days’ up by dragging your groups to Monday and Tuesday. While in your ‘Building Two’ profile, set your ‘Lesson Days’ up by dragging your groups to Thursday and Friday.
• Some schools have rotating schedules. There are generally two ways that Da Capo Inventory can create a rotating schedule:
  • Rotate through various periods while keeping ‘Monday students’ always on ‘Monday’. This would be ideal if you did not have the same amount of teaching periods on each day.
  • Rotate through various periods while rotating through scheduled days off. This means that when Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, or Columbus Day come around, the ‘Monday students’ would then come to their lesson on Tuesday. With this sort of setup, it is important to have enough teaching periods on each day to fulfill the requirements for any given day (ie. if you have 4 lesson periods on some of your teaching days and only 3 available periods on a given day, this particular plan will not work.)

General thoughts for Secondary Teachers #

Through having conversations with secondary teachers, I’ve learned a bit more about various requirements.

A significant change was added in August 2022 to the A/B/X rotating schedule plan. The rotating is now set to rotate across days automatically. For example, if you generally run a schedule that resembles the one below, Da Capo Inventory can create such a rotating schedule for you.

💡 Another benefit for teachers who use the A/B/X schedule: If the A/B days change in the middle of the year, you can have Da Capo Inventory recalculate the A/B days in an instant and print out new lesson cards.

Notice how each group in this teacher’s schedule rotates through all of the A and B day offerings.