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> Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave.

> Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance).

That seems like a really odd way of handling it, and more confusing than it needs to be. For me the class was assigned to a specific room, not the teacher - so it never moved. If we had a substitute, they'd just be in the normal room instead of the usual teacher. If they couldn't get one in time, then either an administrator would bring us to study hall (highschool) or after 10 minutes we'd just leave assuming they couldn't make it (college).

I guess it's a way of handling it that's enabled by the fact that the calendars are electronic. It could be that this way is easier for the school staff, but honestly I have no idea and can't even begin to guess, really.

Even in 2024, schools in major cities experience staffing shortages where there are not enough supposedly-qualified adults to supervise all of the students in their originally scheduled classrooms.

"Solution": class X, Y, and Z all meet in Lunchroom W on Wednesday so one adult can supervise all of them.

Schools are different all over the world. I believe rooms were assigned to teachers as much as possible, but not every teacher needed a room all day every day so there was the occasional change-up. For instance, sometimes biology/chemistry/physics needing the few lab rooms for experiments, and those had to be scheduled in somehow. That also caused other rooms to bump every now and then.

Generally, a teacher not showing up was no real reason for skipping class (no matter how much urban myths said otherwise) but if the absence was known in advance we'd get a free hour. Most kids used those for some extra homework time or to just hang out, unless the free hour lined up with the start or the end of the day.

We didn't really have study hall, just the normal areas in school that you'd also hang out in during breaks (or holes in the schedule, as older kids with personal schedules occasionally had).

In university this rarely happened, most people would leave after about 30 minutes because a lot of them traveled half an hour or more to get there in the first place. People were a lot less willing to abandon classes once they were paying out of their own pocket for them.

Having had a paper planner in high school I don't recall there really being many issues with rooms needing to be swapped or teachers being ill having an impact. If the teacher is ill, the other teacher just takes their room.

Having a digital schedule almost gives the school the ability to be more relaxed with the schedule, as opposed to it being built around a schedule that can hardly move. There is an important part of school which is revolved around routine. I remember it only took a few weeks in the first term before I'd be walking to classed without needing to read the timetable at all.

It's inevitable that we end up moving down this route, but lets not forget the old solution worked just fine and meant you needed a pretty good reason to change the timetable.

It does sound like a dynamic digital schedule is just an invitation for a school to be sloppy. It's been a long time but I just don't recall situations where schedules changed a lot.

Good points. However unlocking the phone in the morning puts my son on the wrong track: you would be surprised how much time one can spend checking animated gifs by using any text field that will inevitably be unlocked as well.

Of course I will take full responsibility in case of bugs... So far it didn't happen.

I applaud your efforts to keep your son from being addicted to screens.

While I'd be more conservative in the setup (I'd probably go with a device without inputs that turns on just to browse to a website directly, making any browsing mistakes or changed layouts less impactful), I do wish there were better alternatives for parents than "hand your kid a smartphone".

In an ideal world, schools would use some kind of one-way messaging devices to get the benefits of modern technology without the addiction smartphones bring, but I don't think we'll see that any time soon. Perhaps something like a (locked-down) Remarkable e-Ink tablet with a cellular network connection to receive school notifications and schedule updates as well as for doing homework in could prove quite useful, but that also sounds way too expensive for schools at the moment and you'd need to lock it down so that it's no more distracting than a piece of paper.

It's not just kids. It would put me on the wrong track too.

I can’t recall even one time my high school schedule changed except between semesters, not any time a class met in another room. Not once. If a teacher was out sick, there was a sub but the room didn’t change.

What can I say, my school worked differently and this was a common occurrence. I do believe they tried to minimise room changes or hour changes as much as possible, but you have to do something if the only relevant substitutes would already be teaching another class at the same time.

In my experience, substitute teachers were generally not skilled in a particular subject. There were there to be an adult in the room. They typically had a lesson plan left by the regular teacher, which almost always involved just reading or working problems on your own and did not depend on the sub being able to actually teach the subject.

If you can't find enough substitutes, pay them more instead of spending money on apps to rearrange schedules.

Same for me. Genuinely doesn’t understand what’s the benefits for anyone. Maybe trying to get back "lost" hours when a teacher is sick? I think kids are better served with a stable, secure schedule than one that try to absolutely fit all the modalities decided for that school year.

Imo it should be the school's responsibility to stick a notice on the classroom itself or at least send an email, rather than expect each and every student to check an app every day. I hadn't been a high school student in a while through.

I agree that there should be a physical fallback or sorts, but I think it's helpful to be prepared just in case. If the school is too lazy to display schedule changes at school for some reason, the app becomes a necessity and that's just stupid.