On 5/4/06, Gavin McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi,
sorry to reply to my own thread.
On Sat, 29 Apr 2006, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
Having seen attendance again now, a couple of comments:
a. One of the requirements mentioned by our school was the possibility for
a teacher, while calling the roll, to be able to see whether a student
is in school today. So, if a student is not in their class they can see
immediately if that student has been marked in previously today (and is
mitching) or if they are just absent today. Would it be possible for
some sort of small coloured icon to appear beside each student
indicating whether they have been marked present in a prior class that
day?
The background behind a student's name should change if they've
previously been marked absent that day. Does this not seem to be
working? It used to work.
b. It seems that once one has entered attendance, the form becomes
immutable. This seems inconvenient. Either a teacher must not press
submit until the very end of class or else they cannot mark someone in
late, should they arrive after submit is pressed. It would be handier
if they could re-edit the roll at least until the end of the class.
The way it is supposed to work is that you check off the students who
aren't in attendance at the beginning of class, and then you can
subsequently convert the absences to tardies if they come in late.
Perhaps I need to prepare some screenshots.
My school (like many others) runs an initial roll call, at 8:40am before
1st class at 8:45am. This roll is the master record of whether a student
is present on that day or not. If a student arrives late, they must first
go to be marked in on the roll sheet before going to class. This master
roll call is partially to do with the impossibility of checking all class
attendances for the day, but it also helps discourage tardiness. I had
presumed we could just treat it as another class for attendance, but issue
[b] above really would ruin that.
Otherwise, I don't know if there is any good reason to treat this
attendance as special, except perhaps as a single attendance record to be
used to flag students as described in issue [a].
We've been accounting for this, much to the chagrin of our Lithuanian
developers. They don't have this kind of roll call or homeroom which
makes a Lithuanian attendance system much simpler than a US or UK one
;-) I was thrown off by the need to do this roll twice daily in UK
elementary schools. That was an unpleasant surprise.
Perhaps these issues are all in hand, if so, I guess you can ignore me. I
just thought I'd give the perspective of our school.
It is very helpful, and it tells me I need to produce some attendance
documentation if I'm going to get more detailed attendance testing.
--Tom
_______________________________________________
Schooltool mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
