I’m a teacher. I like to create a calendar for my students, listing what we’ll be covering (and have covered) when. Right now, I do this using a Google Doc that I share with them, that has a big table in it.
The downside of this is that the calendar shifts. If, say, the section on adding rational functions ends up taking three days instead of the two that I expect, then all the lessons after that get shifted back one day. Right now, I deal with this by manually editing the calendar. But this is a pain to do for many days, and so the result is that I only populate the calendar a week or so in advance. But this obviously decreases the usefulness of the calendar.
To add more complication, the lessons we’re doing aren’t the only things on the calendar, and some things do not shift: For instance, the day when all of the seniors will be out on their orchestra field trip will be the same, regardless of what lesson I finish when.
So I would like an app, or maybe a document template, or something, that would let me enter some entries as movable (which would all be shifted forward or back if something is added or removed), and other entries as fixed. And it needs to be something I can share with my students.
I can’t be the only one who could use this, which means it probably already exists. Anyone know of one?
What you are looking for is called a workflow management application:
Most of these are probably way more complicated than you require, or more costly than you want to pay for. I’ve seen people try to do this in Excel by using linked cells, which works okay until something breaks and the whole thing comes apart like a cheap gold watch. I built a Python library years ago to do a particular type of statistical project scheduling (basically an extension of PERT) for estimating project timelines but people didn’t understand it and I gave up on using and maintaining it.
Can I suggest my go-to midweight planning tool of choice, Airtable? It’s more structured than a Google Doc, but not as complex as a full workflow management software. It’s almost like Excel or Access, but cleaner, easier to use (and view), and prettier on the eyes.
That allows easy drag-and-drop of calendar events to move them to new dates. Or on the paid plan, date dependencies lets you tie subsequent events in a series to a parent event, such that if you move the first event all the other later ones will automatically update too:
You can also DIY a system similar to that using their Excel-like formulas, but it would be a bit more work.
Overall, I find Airtable to be one of the most underrated and useful tools on the web, perfect for situations like this when you’ve outgrown a document but don’t want a full-blown database yet.
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