In most schools, students' music lessons need to be on a rotating schedule so that they don't miss the same class every week. Here is how Music Monitor manages this.

For guidance on the timetabling process more generally, see Manage Timetabling.

See also Manage Timeslots for guidance on some of the setup required.

Rotation Tag

The Rotation Tag is a field in the Tuition Enrolments file. It has options of Fixed or Rotating, as well as weekly (default) or fortnightly.

If you choose a rotating schedule, the lessons will rotate through the teacher's available times, moving later by the same specified amount each week and coming back to the earliest time after it reaches the end.

Fortnightly lessons will be set to occur on either an "Even" week or an "Odd" week. These weeks do not refer to the Week of Term, but to the week of the year. To check which week of the year a particular date falls in, go to Home > Setup Files > Calendar and look at the Week of Year field.

This will sometimes mean that the lessons marked as "Even" will occur in Weeks 1, 3, 5, etc., of the term, if they are even-numbered weeks of the year.

Rotation Function

As described in the timetabling overview article, the Schedule is a template of the teacher's timetable, and then each week's timetable is produced by a process to create Calendar Entries.

The Rotation Tag affects the creation of the Calendar Entries (and from there the creation of attendance records and rolls).

At the time you are creating the Calendar Entries, you will specify the amount by which each lesson will rotate. The script that creates the calendar entries for rotating lessons will also check for any existing calendar entries and skip over them if they are there. It will also avoid any times allocated to fixed enrolments, whether or not these have yet been added to the calendar.

Apart from those reserved times, the rotation function will use all of the teacher's availability. On each day, it will start from the earliest timeslot in the teacher's schedule, and use times up until the latest timeslot in the teacher's schedule. Even if you have not created all the timeslots in between the first and last, rotating lessons will If you want to avoid particular times being used in rotating lessons, enter text (such as "BREAK") into those timeslots, or delete them from the teacher's schedule.

The rotation function only rotates across timeslots within one day. Lessons on another day will rotate among themselves but not across days.

When Enrolling

You can set the Rotation Tag at the time you're enrolling a student, even if you don't yet know the lesson time.

In the enrolment window, select the green Timetabling button and select the Rotation field.

Setting that field now will make the timetabling process smoother, because you will want the option to timetable the fixed lessons first before you embark on the rotating ones.

Calendar Entries

This comes after the scheduling step below, but it's helpful to understand what will happen in this step because it informs your strategy in the scheduling step.

There are two options for how to do this.

One Enrolment at a Time

If you select the Calendar icon on the end of a row on the teacher's Schedule, Music Monitor will create calendar entries across the term for that one enrolment.

The Teacher's Full Schedule

In the More... button on the teacher's Schedule are options for adding all of this teacher's bookings to the calendar at once.

  • ADD ALL these bookings to Calendar Entries - this option, as you may guess, creates Calendar Entries for all bookings on this teacher's Schedule. It does not do anything with unfilled timeslots. This is a very useful script, but if you have already added some bookings to the calendar individually, you may prefer not to use this because it would create duplicates of those entries.
  • Add WHITE bookings only to Calendar Entries - this option is perfect for when you have already added some bookings individually, so they are showing in green, because it does not re-add those ones.
    Take care, however, because if you are doing this for next term, but some teaching dates remain in the current term, you may have bookings that show in green due to upcoming lessons in this term, and they would be overlooked by this script.

Scheduling

The Schedule is essentially a template for that teacher's weekly timetables. You will later use that Schedule to create Calendar Entries for each teacher.

Bearing in mind the above about how the calendar entries work, you need to strategise how to enter lessons into the Schedule.

If there are students with very complicated availability, you may want to enter them first. Perhaps you would enter them as Fixed lessons, and then manually adjust each week's lessons to match their restricted availability. In other cases, you may choose to mark most of the Timeslots as unavailable (by simply typing some text such as "Held" into the space next to the Paste button), and enter the complicated lessons as Rotating. You may still need to manually adjust the calendar entries after creating them.

Note that the New Calendar view allows you to drag and drop calendar entries on a visual calendar display, making it an easy way to move around individual Calendar Entries after they have been created.

Once these complicated ones are done, the recommended method is to add the Fixed lessons to the Schedule, and then slot in the Rotating lessons around them.

You can then use the bulk scripts to generate the remainder of the Calendar Entries as described above.

The Calendar Entries you create here will appear in the Calendar Entries tab for the teacher, and for the student, as well as in any general calendar including the Room Usage view. They will also be used to generate Attendance Records if you use Music Monitor for roll marking.