On 10/22/05, Thomas Mills Hinkle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > 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.
I think it is safe to say we'll have both. Neither seems particularly costly. But I would feel rather silly if six months from now I was presenting a web based assessment system that didn't allow you to directly enter attendance during class. > 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. Trying to automate that sounds vastly more error prone than unchecking boxes on a web form. If you've got a human reading emails and entering absence info into web forms when teachers could do it just as easily, you're wasting time and money. --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
