RichardRadio

I’ve been trying to work out my basic systems to cover my day to day job as a teacher. Its surprising as there are so many teachers doing essentially the same tasks that there aren’t better IT solutions. Most teachers still use paper based systems and are so hot with them that its a task to beat them with technology.

Teachers are still the gatekeepers of their data. We need to get that data out of their markbooks and onto the network (behind the firewall of course).

I decided to document my thinking on my systems that I intend to use this year. Should be useful should I decide to change later on in the year or next year. A lot depends on the particular school you are at and integrating with their systems.

1. Lesson Schedule, Planning and Evaluation

My school gives out a planner with important School dates and deadlines in. If I use this as my planner (‘What am I teaching today?’) then I don’t have to carry 2 things. Also I am going to be printing and filing lesson plans in a folder organised class by class This is a school and NQT requirement (I believe) I like to write a handwritten evaluation on the plan when I am actually in the lesson or at the end of the day. So that is at least 2 paper based systems. I don’t want to create / maintain another system do I?

Paper Versus Electronic Planning
Electronic allows you to 1)search, 2) see different views, 3) copy and paste (timetable) 4) easily correct mistakes/accomodate changes 5) Backup

But paper is quick to access, show collegues and is portable. I get infuriated manually copying timetable information in each week/month into a planner, but when incorporated into the planning process might be a reasonable price to pay, especially as I don’t have the more complicated 2 week timetable at this school.

Also I don’t have a laptop and need to work on multiple machines. That means that proprietry programs are not feasible and I would have to use a MS Office or Web based solution. I don’t really see a web based model being feasible for Planning and Evaluation.

A simple handheld with a PIM might be a good solution – you have to depend on seaching by class name/code to get a ‘by class’ view. Copy and Pasting the timetable isn’t easy but you can use the ‘repeat’ feature on the dates. Would be nice to import School dates/deadlines in to it could the school produce these dates in a standards type format?

2. Gradebook and Tracking

There are 4 assessment points for all years that have to go into the schoolwide SIMS system. It would be nice to “Write once, read anywhere” but SIMS isn’t flexible enough to be the place where you write once. So I am going to have to write into my sytem and this system must provide a SIMS friendly output (I think SIMS accepts an Excel or CSV upload).

An Excel spreadhseet for each class, living on the school network looks like the likely candidate. The downside of Excel as I mentioned for registration is that you get row order problems when kids join/leave the class and you end up doing lots of manual checking.

I would like to use a simple handheld solution like this one: Tiny Red Book It exports to an Excel sheet. Ken had a look at it. I got my hands on an old Handspring Palm but haven’t managed to find a docking station.

3. Registration

I have to do this into the schoolwide SIMS system. I’m not sure how I am going to get this info into my own records. Will I have to copy it manually? Do this in Excel and everytime you get a new kid in class (or loose one) you have to add them on at the bottom which means the row order is different to the SIMS and it makes it even more time consuming and error prone.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.