One thing I would suggest is to give teachers some timely and friendly tech support (you might want to include some technology instruction with that). I did some student teaching at an inner city public school and while I was there 2 of the computers in the classroom (they had 3) stopped talking to the network. I booted the machines using an edubuntu live CD and everything worked fine (it connected to network/internet, it was a software problem, not a hardware problem). We called the board of education's IT department 3 times asking for help and we never got a response in the 2 and 1/2 weeks that I was there. We even went to the computer teacher in the school and they wouldn't help us either (we asked if they would enter the admin password so that we could try to trouble shoot it ourselves). Those 2 computers were basically giant paperweights that whole time (the kids nor the teachers had USB sticks to even move files off the computers). I don't know what IT support is like in other districts but if it's like that then tech support might be the best thing to give them.
Coming from the point of view of a teacher...
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Reading, Writing, RFID
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· Score: 3, Informative
I teach and to me this doesn't sound like such a bad idea. As a homeroom teacher trying to keep track of 25 students or more is a really hard thing to do, let alone a school of 200-300 students. I'm thinking right now about the parents who show up to school and their child isn't around (happens more often that you think) because they got on a bus, or are still in school, or left at a earlier time, or maybe ditched halfway through the day. A system like this would help us to keep track of where students are and possibly alleviate a whole lot of aggravation and panic on the parts of parents and teachers. There is also the paperwork side of this. Teaching is soooooooo much work. I regularly put in 12 - 14 hour days and one thing that would be great is if I didn't have to worry about attendance. There is a lot of attendance paperwork to keep track of, (We SHOULD be doing it on the coputer but the administration seems to have no idea what computers are capable of.) not to mention that in the morning there are a bazillion other things to do along with taking attendance. It would be so nice if they just walked into the school and they were automatically noted. (sigh)
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One thing I would suggest is to give teachers some timely and friendly tech support (you might want to include some technology instruction with that). I did some student teaching at an inner city public school and while I was there 2 of the computers in the classroom (they had 3) stopped talking to the network. I booted the machines using an edubuntu live CD and everything worked fine (it connected to network/internet, it was a software problem, not a hardware problem). We called the board of education's IT department 3 times asking for help and we never got a response in the 2 and 1/2 weeks that I was there. We even went to the computer teacher in the school and they wouldn't help us either (we asked if they would enter the admin password so that we could try to trouble shoot it ourselves). Those 2 computers were basically giant paperweights that whole time (the kids nor the teachers had USB sticks to even move files off the computers). I don't know what IT support is like in other districts but if it's like that then tech support might be the best thing to give them.
I teach and to me this doesn't sound like such a bad idea. As a homeroom teacher trying to keep track of 25 students or more is a really hard thing to do, let alone a school of 200-300 students. I'm thinking right now about the parents who show up to school and their child isn't around (happens more often that you think) because they got on a bus, or are still in school, or left at a earlier time, or maybe ditched halfway through the day. A system like this would help us to keep track of where students are and possibly alleviate a whole lot of aggravation and panic on the parts of parents and teachers. There is also the paperwork side of this. Teaching is soooooooo much work. I regularly put in 12 - 14 hour days and one thing that would be great is if I didn't have to worry about attendance. There is a lot of attendance paperwork to keep track of, (We SHOULD be doing it on the coputer but the administration seems to have no idea what computers are capable of.) not to mention that in the morning there are a bazillion other things to do along with taking attendance. It would be so nice if they just walked into the school and they were automatically noted. (sigh)