Once you have decided on the project and created the project environment, you can put your students to work. Students will either work in groups or individually.
If they are in groups, one of the first things they will do as a group is schedule meetings and milestones. If you have assigned individual projects, then you will likely use a group calendar, such as a class calendar, to schedule the project milestones.
You may allot class time for meetings, or students may decide to meet after class. In a traditional setting, students who meet outside of class must find time to try to coordinate their schedules for a meeting. They may create a calendar and print copies for everyone listing meeting times and milestones, or list the meetings and milestones on a sheet of paper and distribute it.
Not only can a FirstClass calendar allow students to perform these same tasks, it also makes them much easier to do.
When the team leader decides to schedule a meeting in FirstClass, he simply goes into the project's group calendar and creates an event.
You can use the same methods described below in your own group calendar to schedule milestones for individual projects.
This is a sample event that the team leader may schedule.
From this same screen, he can click the Scheduling tab to determine if team members are already booked for that time, and can easily find a mutually convenient meeting time by just looking at one screen.
He can also differentiate events with color. For example, he may use one color to schedule meetings, and another to schedule milestones.
He can display and/or print the calendar in one of a number of different views, including:
• a daily view
He can also view multiple days with this view by selecting the desired days on the mini month view calendar.
• a weekly view
• a monthly view
• a Today view with a mini month calendar
You can use the mini month calendar to easily select days to view in the opposite pane.
When he schedules the meeting, he can request responses from team members to ensure they know about the meeting, schedule repeating events, such as a meeting every Friday at 4 PM, schedule reminders, and even attach messages or
documents that team members may need to review before the meeting.
FirstClass lets you easily coordinate all aspects of a meeting from a single form.
Aside from group scheduling, you can also use FirstClass for personal scheduling. Students who are working individually can use their personal calendars to schedule the milestones you laid out in your project guidelines. They can schedule meetings with you and use the calendar to manage time conflicts as discussed earlier. You can also schedule meetings with them in the same way. All of the features discussed above are still at their fingertips.
Once students have scheduled their meetings and milestones, they can actually conduct their meetings.
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