Using a Rotating schedule vs Long Term plans

With lesson planning software there are generally two approaches taken to calendars:

1.    Set up a rotating schedule where each day is divided into a number of periods, each period associated with a subject.  The schedule could cover from two days (A/B) to eight days. Lessons are attached to a particular period.

2.    Create a Long Term plan that belongs to a subject.  The Long Term plan spans a number of days.  Attach lessons to the Long Term plan using Units of Work to maintain lesson collections.

Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks.

Rotating schedule benefits:

1.    The same lesson can be assigned to multiple periods.
2.    If a lesson doesn't get taught for some reason it can be bumped forward and all lessons subsequent to it will also be bumped forward into the next available subject period.  Lessons can also be yanked back.
3.    Lessons don't need to contain subjects, dates or times, just key words and durations.
4.    Lessons can reside in a single archive which can be searched using key words or full text search.

Drawbacks:

1.    As lessons are edited, previous versions that were appropriate to their specific delivery situation are lost. On the other hand making duplicate lessons will quickly degrade the usefulness of the lesson archive.
2.    To prevent duplicates, users are incentivised to enter all activities into a single large record, which becomes more difficult to search for activity duration and for printing.
3.    As key words are the only way of associating a lesson with a subject, when many lessons belong to a subject, it can become difficult to work out how individual lessons relate to each other due to tagging mismatches.


Long Term plan benefits:

1.    A high level view of the material being taught can be shown, which ensures the curriculum is being adequately covered.
2.    Lessons can cover any length of time, even spanning days if necessary.
3.    The weekly calendar display allows you to visually see the duration of a lesson. Rather than creating a large single document, lessons get broken down into discrete activities contained within the Units of Work under a Long Term plan, each of which is a separate record. This simplifies report printing.
4.    Units of Work containing multiple lessons can be easily copied about.

Drawbacks:

1.    Bumping a lesson can only shift it to the next lesson.  All subsequent lessons cannot be bumped forward, because the last lesson has nowhere to go.
2.    Because an individual lesson cannot belong to multiple Units of Work, individual lessons must be copied forward and amended rather than the same record being used over and over again.

Which calendar style is best? It depends on your school. High schools generally use a rigid period structure.  Elementary schools don't.