Student Timetable on back of ID Card

[LucieP]

Hi all,

 

Not wanting to reinvent the wheel....

 

Does anyone have a method of adding student timetables to the back of an ID card on masse - or just printed small enough to be added to the back of an ID card?

 

We will be using Arbor moving forwards

 

Yours hopefully...

 

Lucie

[Dos_Box]

I have no idea how to go about that, but TES has this nice template for an ID card sized timetable - https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/mini-timetable-for-your-lanyard-12563465

Automating that could be a lot of fun though!

[LucieP]

Indeed - we found that and loved it, but dont fancy recreating that 1500 times!!

[howartp]

Our ID card software (Card Exchange) can read from various data sources including SQL - I don't know if it reads Excel or CSV as well, but either way you could mass-export the timetable from MIS to CSV/Excel/SQL table then point the ID card software at it.

 

I might try this just for the hell of it!

[LucieP]

Ooh that's a good idea

[dhicks]

Does anyone have a method of adding student timetables to the back of an ID card on masse - or just printed small enough to be added to the back of an ID card?

 

If you re-did that example template as a Word / Docs file you could do a mailmerge with a spreadsheet, if you could get the data into that format. If your ID cards are a standard size of some kind (credit card size?) you can probably find a matching sticker you can print with a sticker printer and stick on the back of each pupil's ID card.

[risherwood]

Hi

 

Has anybody got any further with this?

 

We are running easybadge and would like to masse print timetables on the back of the ID cards.

 

the only option i can see on Easybadge is imprt/export from csv...

[dhicks]

We are running easybadge and would like to masse print timetables on the back of the ID cards.

 

I'm not familier with EasyBadge, but a quick look at their website suggests they have a database of some sort that you could possibly read from / write to, you could possibly get data into their system that way. Alternativly, if the EasyBadge printer (which can do double-sided badge printing, seemingly) appears as a standard printer on whatever device you have it plugged in to you should be able to use pretty much anything that can produce a document the correct dimensions to print to it - have something generate a two-page PDF document that you jut send to the printer?

[Romantin]

Hey Lucie,

 

We did something similar at our school. You can export the timetables from Arbor, then use a tool like Excel to format them small enough to fit on the back of an ID card. Printing them on sticker labels and sticking them to the back of the cards worked for us.

 

Cheers!

[msi_school]

I did this with a two week timetable a couple of years ago and it was very small I think a credit card is about 10% the size of an A4 page. so a lot of people could not read it but I know that ours is not to reason why.

 

I could not work out how to get them to print via the badge printing software so we just exported the timetables from SIMS and printed them using the card printer as a normal printer. We ended up doing the ID cards on a mifare and the timetable on a separate basic card before putting them in holders and distributing them because I did not trust myself to get the printing and the cards in the same order it also turned out to be easier for students with existing ID badges.

[Anonymous2000]

Printing them on credit sized card stickers seems like a good plan. If you print them on the card what happens when timetables change etc? Do you print a new card?

[Rob_D]

We use a mailmerge from a big timetable export either into the Avery 80X50r label sheets (for bulk jobs), or a single timetable sheet on a brother label printer with a 50mmX30m continuous roll (for singles or short runs). The brother brings the price per sticker down by about 60% but takes a bit longer as we have to import the created timetables into the software.

 

 

It's worth noting that between class changes, wearing/weathering, and lost badges we're probably printing about 4 labels per student, per year.

Edited May 29, 2024 by Rob_D

[HPlum78]

If you have a kiosk that displays info you could add a card reader to that and let the students see their timetable by swiping their card on that, also add their timetable to the student home page and just in case we also put their timetables into outlook...

[Sephiroth]

If you have a kiosk that displays info you could add a card reader to that and let the students see their timetable by swiping their card on that, also add their timetable to the student home page and just in case we also put their timetables into outlook...

 

I would strongly recommend a digital solution, rather than a printed one, if only because you will be constantly printing new badges/stickers. We overcome this by automating the timetable into the calendar (Google for us, but MS 365 is also easy to set up) for each student. That way, when it updates, everything just changes to reflect that.

[MrBHall]

Hello,

 

I am thinking of inserting timetables into our ID Card software EasyBadge and I wondered if anyone have a way of exporting data from class timetables from a MIS system, in this case we use Bromcom.

 

I can see EasyBadge has a external connection tool that allows it to pull data from a SQL server or Access database but I am unsure how the data would look and it could potentially cause issues. I might have to look at creating a separate timetable template and insert the text fields which would be used from the database.

 

Could anyone suggest what I could do or does anyone have any other ideas?

 

Many thanks,

Ben