> 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.
Both is good. > > 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. Right -- when I said "the best system I've seen" above, I meant the best for teachers -- as in, the easiest/fastest way to report the data electronically after glancing at my attendance list -- not the best in terms of overall efficiency. I think a good input system would take me little more time than writing that e-mail did and cut the person who read the email out of the system. The reason I gave the e-mail w/ a few names as an example was to emphasize that a good input system may not look like a typical attendance book. If you admit that for many cases what will happen is data will be copied from a pencil-and-paper list to a computer, the design objective changes: rather than mimicking the paper checklist the teacher would use in a webform, you should figure out a way to make the necessary data entry as efficient as possible (which may or may not look like the checklist that is easiest to use in the class itself). Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
