Printing a Timetable

A timetable on a screen is read by whoever is at the screen. A timetable on a wall is read by a class, all term, and by the teacher covering a lesson at ten minutes' notice. Print gives you the second one.

It is on two tabs of the Timetable workspace: Builder, which prints the class you are looking at, and Teachers, which prints the teacher you are looking at.

What comes out

One A4 sheet, landscape, in your school's own colours and carrying your logo and contact details. Periods run down the left with their bell times, days across the top, and every lesson names its subject, who is taking it and where.

Breaks are drawn as a band across the whole week rather than as five empty cells, because a break is the same for every class and drawing it as the absence of a lesson makes the sheet look like it has holes in it.

A double occupies both of the periods it runs across, once, rather than appearing twice.

A free period is left blank. So is a period your bell schedule does not run on that day, which is what a school with a short Friday sees.

Whose week it is

A class sheet names the teacher against each lesson. It includes lessons taught to the whole year group at once: a class whose Maths is taken with the rest of its year in the hall has that lesson on its own timetable, because that is where the class has to be.

A teacher sheet names the class instead. It is drawn against every bell schedule that teacher works to, so somebody taking both a junior class and a senior one gets a single week rather than two half ones.

It never paginates

A school week is a fixed rectangle, and a timetable continued overleaf is one nobody can read without taking it off the wall. The rows shrink to fit the page instead.

On a long day the room is dropped from every lesson to make space, rather than from some of them: a sheet where two lessons name a room and thirty do not reads as missing data rather than as a choice. The subject and who it is with always stay.

Drafts print, and say so

You can print a draft. It carries a line under the title reading DRAFT: not the published timetable, in your school's accent colour.

That stamp is the point. A sheet pinned to a wall outlives the screen it was printed from, and a draft that looked exactly like the live week is the week a class ends up being taught by mistake.

The version number is on every sheet for the same reason: when the week changes and you reprint, the old sheet on the wall can be told apart from the new one at a glance.

On the phone

The mobile app prints the same sheet. Open a timetable and tap Week beside the day heading: the sheet is rendered and handed to your phone's own share sheet, which offers Save to Files, print, email and anything else you have installed.

Four people can do it, each getting their own week and nothing else:

• a student, their class's week;
• a parent, a child's week, named after the child rather than the class, because a parent with three children is choosing between people;
• a teacher, their own consolidated week across every class they take;
• an administrator, the week of whichever class they are looking at.

The sheet is always the school's live timetable, never a draft. Drafts are the workspace's business, and the phone has no builder.

And on the web

The same Download week (PDF) button sits on every timetable page in the browser: a student's own timetable, a parent's page for each child, a teacher's My Timetable, and the Timetable tab of any class. It prints the week on the screen, so nobody has to find the workspace to get a copy of their own timetable.

Who can print

Anyone who can see the timetable can print the published one, which now includes families on their own week. Printing a draft needs the same permission as seeing a draft on screen. A printed timetable is a copy that leaves the building, so it is not handed to somebody the workspace would not show it to.