> > Another question: Is the assumption that the teacher has their own > > networked computer running during every class? I don't think that's a > > good general assumption to make. And even if so, I think the attendence > > GUI needs to be separate from the other Schooltool GUI. The GUI would > > need to be able to tie-in with the upcoming "Teacher's tool" in > > Edubuntu, for example, or any other equivalent (commercial) teacher's > > classroom tool, ideally. > > The assumption in SchoolTool 2006 is that every teacher has their own > networked computer running in every class, and that the teacher will > enter attendance data in real time, via the SchoolTool web interface. > I don't know why, in this iteration, we would be worrying about > interfacing with other applications, which probably won't be used at > our test schools. > > I'm sure we'll also come up with forms to allow relatively efficient > entry of data by a clerk who is entering the data for the whole > school, but I'm more interested in the case where every teacher has a > computer. In the longer run, we'll want to add support for taking > attendance via pda, cell phone, & scanned paper forms, but that's down > the road.
As a teacher who's quite comfortable with computers (read: is a programmer), I can't imagine entering attendance data in real time into a web interface -- even if it were a slick hula or google-maps style web-interface. I've got too much to pay attention to in class to go back to a computer in the midst of class -- any regular tracking system I use has to fit onto a clipboard or equivalent. I'd think it would be worth prioritizing a good interface for data entry at the end of the day/week/month by an individual teacher or a clerk. Going from my experience, I'd say this should come *before* the real-time-attendance-entry you've described -- we're still waiting on computers that feels like paper to make real time data entry in class practical. The best system I've seen at a school for getting this information from teachers was simply e-mail: we e-mailed a list of absent and late students at the end of each day. This was relatively easy on teachers as absence and tardiness were relatively rare, so often we had to type only a few names or nothing at all. Of course, with a bit of constraint on the abbreviations teachers used, a script could have been whipped together to read the e-mails into whatever the database was the office was using. I'd hope that schooltool would provide something equally easy for teachers and basically cut out the time the office spent reading the e-mails and entering the data. Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
