Hello, a question from a school administrator here.
I work in a small private section which is part of a larger state school (not in the UK). We teach from primary up to high school, have around 20 teachers, a Head, and 3 admin staff. My role is administrative - typical school office stuff (enrolments, finance, sorting cover, communications etc).
We really need a good, consistent, user-friendly way to share a calendar / information with all our staff. For various reasons, we almost never meet face-to-face as a group - there are no morning meetings, no assemblies, no regular staff meetings, teachers only have to be in school when they are actually teaching, timetables mean that they are never all free at the same time - and this makes it very hard to pass on important dates / planning info / give heads-up. Our Head is well-meaning but tends to be very reactive rather than proactive, and he's not good at written communication. To date we have relied on a weekly 'Bulletin' which is a real mish-mash of info, and it's just a Google Doc that gets copied, updated and shared. For dates we just have a table of key dates and info that gets added to through the year - but it can't be used to visualise the planning for the year.
Can anyone recommend some kind of school planning / calendar package that might do what we need? Have you come across anything that works as a group planning / calendar tool while also providing information and being visually user-friendly? And adaptable to the different people using it - not techy at all to very tech friendly?
Google calendar doesn't work - visually it's just too small when we have multiple things to be aware of on any one day. A Gant chart type thing? And how to make it accessible to people on phones / laptops?
TIA for any ideas.