Set Up Bell Schedule

The Bell Schedule feature associates class schedules with specific periods in the school day, leveraging data from your school's Student Information System (SIS) to be displayed across your Minga.

Permission Level: Owner | District Manager

Two key elements to running a more efficient school are automation and visibility. This is where Bell Schedule comes in. This feature allows school staff to understand where a student should be at any given time, simply by looking at a student list or student ID. Additionally, Bell Schedule allows for automating the process of uploading tardy data to the SIS. This can save your school hours of manual work.

Bell schedules can support schools with different schedules for specific days of the week, including variations such as early dismissals, late starts, and grade-specific schedules.

In this article:

1. Enable Bell Schedule
2. Create Terms for Schedules
3. Create a Schedule
4. Assign a Schedule to a Day in the Calendar
5. Enable Visibility of Bell Schedules in Minga

While students may already be able to view their daily schedules on their My Tools dashboard, enabling Bell Schedule will show more granular data, like the teacher's name and the room.

This is valuable for:

• Students gain better visibility of their class schedules from their MyTools page
• Quickly identifying where students are scheduled to be for any school staff
• Automated scheduling flexibility following your school patterns with easy overview and editing of your school calendar from Minga

How to Enable Bell Schedule

Before any creation of Bell Schedules is possible, this feature must first be enabled by the Minga team. Once enabled, a new menu option will appear within Settings called Bell Schedule, and this will only be visible to Owners and District Managers.

1. Navigate to Settings > Settings
2. Under Scheduling > Toggle on ‘Enable bell schedule for owners and managers’ if not done so already

Create Terms

When Bell Schedule is turned on, it will populate information from your SIS. However, this information is often not very descriptive. So, renaming and providing descriptions of terms can help with identification in Minga.

1. Navigate to Settings > Bell Schedule > Terms
2. Validate the terms that have come in from the SIS and rename as desired
3. Once a schedule is made in the next step, applicable schedules to each term will show here

Create your Bell Schedule

You can create a full daily schedule for each variation of your days. A separate schedule can be created for specific variations, including different grade schedules or special event days. Here, we are mapping information from the SIS (short codes) with specific periods and providing them with names that will be visible within Minga for students and teachers.

1. Settings > Bell Schedule > Schedules
2. Click Create Schedule
3. Give this schedule a name (this is visible to Owners and District Managers only)
4. Match each period to the Short Code (this data comes from your SIS)
5. Set the specific Start Time and End Time for each period
6. Choose which days this schedule will be applied to
7. Select which term this specific schedule applies to
8. Click Create or Save

Select a Daily Schedule for each day

Now we can assign specific schedules to days of the school week.

1. Navigate to Settings > Bell Schedule > Calendar
2. Select what schedule each day abides by (if different than the Default for that day, chosen when you made the Schedule)

Make the Schedule Information Visible to the School

Visibility of bell schedule information can be toggled on or off at any time. This allows for more control if the schedule requires any editing or adjustments.

To show schedules for staff and students:

1. Navigate to Settings > Scheduling
2. Toggle ‘Show bell schedule for staff and students’ to make schedule information visible across your school's Minga
   1. Toggle ‘Show schedule on student profile’ to show a student's entire daily schedule on their student profile