Change unit dates/lengths more easily
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Erin Nutsugah
Sometimes I need to adjust the dates of a unit just a little. In the unit planner view, you can push a whole unit forward OR pull the end of it to become longer, but you can't pull the front of it to make it shorter. If you try to shorten it by pulling the end of the previous unit to make that one longer, it bumps the next unit out completely. It would be nice if the "pulling" part was more natural OR there was a place to type in the unit's dates.
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Meaghan Hall
Agreed! This is especially challenging if you have sub-units.
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Mary Ellen Wessels
I like the wysiwyg interface of the planner but I'd like to be able to also change dates in settings somehow for a unit. This makes it easy if I just want to swap units in certain trimesters. conversely - having a way to scroll forward and backward in time for unit planner seems to be missing - or I'm just not seeing it?? :-D
Marika Ross
Merged in a post:
Set Unit Dates
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Angela Healy
I would love to be able to type an end and start date for a unit rather than drag the size of the unit block to a particular date.
Marika Ross
Merged in a post:
Unit Planning
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Chelsea Flora
Ability to change Unit start and end dates needs improvement. Currently, when I try to plan a Unit, but do not know exactly when I want to start it, trying to move the unit changes everything else in the plan book.
Marika Ross
Hi Chelsea!
Unit planning is definitely tricky! I'm sure you already know this, but we suggest backwards planning with units to avoid planbook schedules getting jumbled! Here's a video showing how to do it: https://www.commoncurriculum.com/help/change-a-units-start-and-end-date-5tKm1kCFdCQowYeSsyeUgm.
Thanks!
Marika
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Tiffany Davis
I have problems when I want to add an extra day at the end of a unit, but I'm in the week view. I'll bump the current day to create a space to put something at the end of a unit, but that puts my new lesson in the next unit, not the current one. I end up having to undo that, go into my unit planner, shift the next unit, add a day to the current unit, then add in the activity. It would be nice if it asked which unit to put it in or even if it just didn't put it in a unit. Then I could just extend the unit when I had time later.
Marika Ross
Tiffany Davis: Hi Tiffany! Thanks for the suggestion on how we can make our unit planner better. We're looking at a few things we can do this year to increase functionality and ease of use. I'll bring this up when we talk about it!
Cheers!
Marika
Marika Ross
Merged in a post:
Adjust unit by dates
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Sarah Geppert
Sometimes the drag function doesn't work very well for the units. (no response, or over-response) Could we manually extend a unit (or shrink it, or move it around) by adjusting the dates on the unit itself?
Scott Ames-Messinger
Thanks for the suggestion, Erin! This is definitely a source of frustration and we need to add a way to move the start of a unit out.
As for moving the end of the unit, what you want to do is completely normal -- you want to move the end and have other units move down. The problem with building the unit planner this way is you can't drag a unit to subsume another unit -- in other words, you can't drag a unit around other units. We were forced with either supporting one use case (bumping units when you extend their end date) or the other (let units be dragged around other units) and chose to support the later.
To extend a unit, first move the unit after it -- moving a unit will bump the following units down. Then, you can drag the end of the unit to the place you want. Sadly, it's a two step process instead of one. However, because we couldn't resolve the impasse above, this was the best we could come up with!
As for typing in the dates, this would be awesome! However, we ran into the problem when we were thinking of building this: how would units next to the unit with dates being changed react? I guess one option is we could give people a date change screen that lets them adjust all their start/end dates for the units and forces them to make sure the start/end dates don't overlap with other units. The downside is you'd have to do the work to make sure all your units didn't overlap before you could close the dialog and save the unit dates. The upside is it would let you do what you want. Would that be useful?
Also, last question -- you're using the words "Pull" and "Push". Are you moving units by dragging them or by using the Lesson Menu and pushing the first lesson of a unit forward?
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Erin Nutsugah
Scott Ames-Messinger: Hey Scott - Thanks for the thoughtful reply! That dilemma makes sense. Personally, I would find that date change screen useful. As for "pulling" and "pushing," I've moved units around both ways - I had to do this again this weekend and had better luck using the Lesson Menu to push forward the second unit, and then going to the Unit Planner screen to drag the first one out longer.
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Sarah Geppert
Scott Ames-Messinger: What if you made it possible for us to adjust dates, but also put in a small window that would allow us to preview changes? Then we could see a visual representation of what the program predicts would happen if we moved those dates.
Gracias,
Sarah
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Kristen Reck
Scott Ames-Messinger: In the unit planner, I would love to be able to say how many days a unit is. Some of my units are really long, and I have to count the days as I'm dragging them out in the planner..
Scott Ames-Messinger
Kristen Reck: That's a great point. We'll have to look at adding that information as you drag the unit, perhaps as a tooltip or sorts that shows you the length as you drag.