Timetable Management for Schools

Supertime 2000 is a solution for one critical problem that schools face today-timetable management. It provides a flexible work environment for creating, editing and appending timetables. Such flexibility allows you to continue adding and subtracting from your timetable without having to start from scratch each time a single variable changes. In doing so, it saves you time and energy, both precious commodities to a teacher these days.

The program is simple to install and works on any Win 95 or higher. It comes with a user guide that is more of a 'Getting Started' manual. To begin with you will create a school with a defined week and periods structure. It allows you to have up to nine schools in an institution. You can choose between a standard Monday-Saturday week, or a Gulf week, that is, Saturday-Thursday.

You also have to define single or multiple classes, resources and subjects. Various combinations of a class, resource and subject help generate plausible slots on a timetable. You can create a regular period indent (one period in a day) or a cluster period indent (a combination of two or more periods). An advantage of this system is the ability to create a plausible set up and test it, prior to generating any report or timetable.

Reports can be printed but the print layouts are pre-defined templates and can't be changed. One useful functionality in the software is resource sharing. The arts school for example could be a shared resource between the primary, secondary and high school. The challenge of making timetables lies in the teacher seeing as many different combinations of a particular course of classes fit in for multiple subject streams. Supertime 2000 handles this effectively with groups and constraints. If there's a resource conflict, it will indicate that to you. Another feature that comes with the Professional Edition of Supertime 2000 is called Proxy. After you've made the timetables, it's possible that some teachers would be unavailable later. The Proxy feature lets you key in substitute teachers and see how it will affect your timetable.

The Bottom Line. This software is for those schools that do not have any prior school management software and are looking to automate critical solutions that are also easy on the budget. It's main interface could be better though as it simply shows a blank window. It would be useful if some basic statistics are show in this when the software runs.

Priya Ramachandra at PCQ Labs