![]() The second advantage of software is that I can change the amount of time or the day on which I plan to teach a lesson, and if I set up dependencies between my lessons (and units), the entire Gantt chart will adjust itself accordingly. This way, my plans reflect the actual meetings of my class I set the holidays in one document with the work days on M/W, then I just copy the document, duplicating the units and lessons as well as the holiday calendar, and then I just change the work days to Tu/Th. ![]() Merlin Project Express also skips over days marked as holidays (which it calls "exceptions"), even if they fall on work days - it marks them unavailable just like non-work days. Similarly, I can enter holidays in the global calendar, and it will skip over those days on the Gantt chart too: The white columns on the Gantt charts above reflect these Regular Hours settings, and all days not set here are marked as unavailable, and the Gantt chart skips over them as it plots my lessons The lessons in my Gantt chart skip over days that aren’t marked as “Work Days,” so I only make Monday and Wednesday available for my classes that only meet on those days, and vice versa for my Tuesday/Thursday classes. My classes only meet twice a week (Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday, with Fridays having a monthly rotation that I just use for extra work time), so in Merlin I can set my working days to only be on M/W or Tu/Th, and it will only count those days, skipping over the rest, as it plots my lessons. The first advantage of using software rather than paper is that Merlin Project Express lets me be much more granular, planning by the day rather than by weeks. I probably only use 10% of its features (leave the rest for people who do this for a living), but it helps me keep track of where I am supposed to be in a unit, and how changes I make now will affect the rest of the year. So, for the past three years, I’ve been using a program called Merlin Project Express (I have it as a part of the spectacular app subscription service Setapp, which I highly recommend), which is a Gantt-charting powerhouse. Second, I felt locked into my plan from the start of the year, and anytime I wanted to do something different (responsive teaching means integrating current events, or in my case new album releases, into your class tomorrow). While this was a useful exercise for planning, there were two major drawbacks to writing these charts on paper: first, there was no way to adjust the chart if students needed more time in a unit, or if there were snow days. ![]() It helped to see the scope of my entire year, and it also helped me to work around major disruptions, like Winter and Spring break and statewide testing. Every August, I would sit down for an hour or two and write the ten months of the school year along the top of a horizontal page, then list the six units I teach along the left side, and draw a box alongside each unit under the weeks I planned to teach them. I’ve been plotting my lessons out using Gantt charts for years now, a practice I started on paper. Gantt charts, at their most basic, plot vertical lists of tasks along a horizontal chart showing the progression of time, giving a visual representation of how a project will unfold over the course of days, weeks, or months.Ī Gantt chart of my Unit 1, plotting the unit's 11 lessons along the days/dates between the last week of August and the first week of October One tool that consistently crops up in discussions around productivity, and the one that has served me and my students the most (though they don’t realize it), comes from the world of project management and is known as the Gantt chart. I am very interested in the world of capital-p “Productivity,” and I read and listen to (what some might consider) an embarrassingly large amount of content relating to personal productivity and efficiency. ![]() It's a new school year! Do you know what you're teaching in May?
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