With almost 4800 users from 2500 different schools across the Nordic countries, Plandisc is beginning to set its mark on the school planning map. But what makes Plandisc so great for schools?
The Plandisc team set out to ask our users why planning the school year in an interactive cyclical calendar works so well for schools and universities.
After speaking to two of our avid users, Østerbyskolen in Denmark and the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), we got a clear picture of why the schools chose to and continue planning their school year with Plandisc.
What makes Plandisc so great for Schools?
Being able to view the plans for the whole school year in one single view is one of the main reasons why Østerbyskolens administration continues to use Plandisc. In addition to this unique overview, they mention several other benefits:
- Knowledge sharing has increased
- Coordinating events has been simplified
- Time spent planning has been reduced
- Evaluating events has become easier – and this knowledge can be used for planning future events
- Intuitive software is software you actually use
Increased Knowledge Sharing
With each department creating their own calendar, in the shape of a ring, and implementing them in one collective view, knowledge sharing between teachers and grades is now much easier. With the whole staff having access to Plandisc, it’s easy to share documents, presentations, and links between departments. This overview allows the staff to get inspired from each other’s plans and presentations as well as making it easier to collaborate with one-another.
“Sharing the rings between departments ensures knowledge sharing, and it aids us in creating an overview, allowing us to detect and prevent double-bookings.” – Østerbyskolen
Coordinating events
Before Plandisc, the school administration had a hard time coordinating events, activities and exams between grades. However, now Østerbyskolen has a simple and easy overview between grades, making sure activities and events don’t overlap. Not only does the schools Plandisc reduce double-booking, but this overview also allows the staff to reduce the time spent on planning.
Time spent planning reduced
A teacher’s and school administration’s time is limited, with little preparation time for all the teaching material that needs to be planned – so the quicker plans can be coordinated the better. Just on planning the next year alone Østerbyskolen saved 2 hours per teacher!
Ensure that your meetings and events are a success!
Some of you might have been responsible for a meeting or event and left feeling unsure with what the staff actually thought about it. The only way to really know is if you have them evaluate it. But sending out multiple emails and waiting for responses ends up being a tedious task – which is why being able to send out an evaluation directly from the plandisc event, which the staff are already connected do, makes the evaluation task both easy and a lot less time consuming.
If you want your staff to use a software, it has to be intuitive
Nothing is worse than having to spend time you don’t have trying to figure out a software. With regular feedback from our users, we’re always working on making Plandisc as user-friendly as possible, and so far, the efforts have paid off.
“The software is intuitive, so it’s easy to get started.” – Østerbyskolen
Now how about Universities? What makes Plandisc such a good fit for higher education?
Being one of the top universities in the Nordic countries, the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) is an ambitious university that strives to promote research results to further develop society. In relation to these high aspirations, the university needed a planning tool they could rely on to ease the collaboration between, and within departments, as well as reduce overlapping events and tedious work.
“We save time, among other things because there is no need to correct 3 different excel sheets, which must subsequently be uploaded to the right places. It makes planning and administrative changes much easier – Our time spent planning for next year was reduced by 20%” – SDU
With years of experience with Plandisc under their belt, the advantages of using an interactive cyclical calendar at SDU are evident. Imagine reducing your time spent on planning the next semester by 20% while increasing the transparency within the university?
Plan your year only once
Set activities on repeat or “re-plan” them to plot them in for the following years. Increased synergy between and within departments invites for cross-disciplinary collaboration, allowing more groups to get involved in various processes.
“It was the solution for our office to get our departments together – At the same time, it makes it easier to select between the information that is relevant to the individual.” – SDU
With increased collaboration and insight into upcoming events, the workload that comes along with planning across such a large organization is significantly reduced – better yet, SDU no longer experiences anywhere near the same amount of scheduling errors, naturally decreasing the administrative workload.
“Sharing the ring between departments ensures knowledge sharing and helps us to form the overview that makes double bookings detected“ – SDU
Filtering the Plandisc and creating as many calendars as you please, so that you only see the information that’s relevant for you, makes the solution extremely customizable.
Overall, implementing scheduling and event coordination with Plandisc has been a win-win for thousands of schools and universities already, improving their overview and rhythm of activities throughout the school year.
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