> Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance).

That seems like a really odd way of handling it, and more confusing than it needs to be. For me the class was assigned to a specific room, not the teacher - so it never moved. If we had a substitute, they'd just be in the normal room instead of the usual teacher. If they couldn't get one in time, then either an administrator would bring us to study hall (highschool) or after 10 minutes we'd just leave assuming they couldn't make it (college).

"Solution": class X, Y, and Z all meet in Lunchroom W on Wednesday so one adult can supervise all of them.

Generally, a teacher not showing up was no real reason for skipping class (no matter how much urban myths said otherwise) but if the absence was known in advance we'd get a free hour. Most kids used those for some extra homework time or to just hang out, unless the free hour lined up with the start or the end of the day.

We didn't really have study hall, just the normal areas in school that you'd also hang out in during breaks (or holes in the schedule, as older kids with personal schedules occasionally had).

In university this rarely happened, most people would leave after about 30 minutes because a lot of them traveled half an hour or more to get there in the first place. People were a lot less willing to abandon classes once they were paying out of their own pocket for them.

If you can't find enough substitutes, pay them more instead of spending money on apps to rearrange schedules.

Having a digital schedule almost gives the school the ability to be more relaxed with the schedule, as opposed to it being built around a schedule that can hardly move. There is an important part of school which is revolved around routine. I remember it only took a few weeks in the first term before I'd be walking to classed without needing to read the timetable at all.

It's inevitable that we end up moving down this route, but lets not forget the old solution worked just fine and meant you needed a pretty good reason to change the timetable.

Of course I will take full responsibility in case of bugs... So far it didn't happen.

While I'd be more conservative in the setup (I'd probably go with a device without inputs that turns on just to browse to a website directly, making any browsing mistakes or changed layouts less impactful), I do wish there were better alternatives for parents than "hand your kid a smartphone".

In an ideal world, schools would use some kind of one-way messaging devices to get the benefits of modern technology without the addiction smartphones bring, but I don't think we'll see that any time soon. Perhaps something like a (locked-down) Remarkable e-Ink tablet with a cellular network connection to receive school notifications and schedule updates as well as for doing homework in could prove quite useful, but that also sounds way too expensive for schools at the moment and you'd need to lock it down so that it's no more distracting than a piece of paper.

Strangely, we (Gen X) managed to do it, w/o being up2date. So you came into school and found out teacher's ill, etc? Cry me a river.

We even managed to do w/o knowing if our friend was available - we just rang the doorbell. Imagine - all w/o a phone! Not even had a landline!

Bees dorksy parents, i see...

What on earth is the point? When I was a kid we just had the same timetable repeating every week. It changed once a year, at the beginning of the academic year, meaning that within a few weeks I knew it from memory and didn't need to keep looking it up.

In the extremely rare event that things deviated from the timetable, the school found a way to tell us. It's not hard to convey a message to a group of students when you know exactly which room they'll physically be in at any given moment; another advantage of a fixed timetable.

If the school can't accomplish such basic tasks as scheduling a simple timetable, that's the adults' problem, not the children's.

Hey, it's perfect to train the next generation of Deliveroo riders and Uber drivers...

Try doing that today and see how you get on. Like it or not, the world is changing