A better school schedule means balancing the needs of students, teachers, and other faculty members to increase efficacy across the board while providing crucial access to the right classes at the right time for the student populace. Technology can provide a critical role in changing how we think about the modern school schedule, putting the future needs of students and the current needs of teachers and faculty on equal ground while simplifying the process altogether.

There are many ways to build a better school schedule with the help of technology, but one thing’s for sure – the current system needs help. Teachers are overworked in the United States in comparison to their world counterparts, conducting classroom instruction at a rate that has a 30%-50% higher hour workload per week than countries such as Finland and Singapore.

What Can Technology Do For The Modern School Schedule?

By increasing school schedule efficiency and efficacy, teachers could decrease that workload while increasing the quality of their face-to-face time with students. What if eLearning was used as a substitute for face-to-face instructional lecturing for an hour each school day – giving students the opportunity to learn via multimedia tools either on their own smart devices or on school computers?

Using technology to this effect could increase teacher planning time for actual face-to-face students interactions by over 100%! In a recent analysis of 120 different school districts, the amount of time allotted to a teacher for planning per day is roughly 45 minutes.

If eLearning takes the place of a teacher for one extra hour each day, this opens time for teachers to plan more and collaborate with their peers to solve problems which may have arisen the day before or even the week before – crucial time which isn’t available to them as the modern school schedule sits today.

Increasing Student Access To The Classes Which Matter

Another key benefit of technology when it comes to refining and retooling school schedules is that it can allow for school districts and schools themselves to save resources and allocate the resources they do use in a smarter fashion.

In the case of the model of future scheduling, students are first assigned to required courses with the help of an online database. Then, students are given the opportunity to choose from a pool of electives for semesters down the road via an online course request database.

This way of bringing technology into the modern school schedule-making process has several benefits. First, paper and in-person face-to-face staff hours aren’t necessary when it comes to putting students’ semester schedules together.

Secondly, staff can analyze the most popular elective choices and use that to allocate the right teachers to the right classes in the right amounts for each semester. Rather than offering a static array of courses that have varying levels of popularity, students are given better options and schools are given a chance to staff those options in advance.

Future staff requirements can be hashed out by basically polling students with the help of online course requests, giving schools and students alike a chance at building a smart and more effective school workday that meets and exceeds everyone’s needs.