This is the Problem

I am after some solutions.

This week is the last week of school. It is supposed to be a week of extra-curricular activities and field trips. There have been none. Instead we teachers have filled our hours with filling in reports (on paper), filling in cumulative records for each student (same thing and on paper) and filling in a spreadsheet of results (electronically). Each student needs this done for them by each of their teachers. So if you teach 150 students (the average teacher does), 3 exams each, that is 1350 scores you have to input.

This time consuming task has created a culture of abstinence from school for the last week. Today 4 students from my class turned up. I do not blame them- they don’t get taught.

So what is the solution? Surely a paper-based system is out-dated. All of the teachers have computers, internet and the skills to type data into a spreadsheet. But I can’t think how this would link to the students getting a personalised report.

At my last school I had the use of SIMS. A school management software that did all of this. It was the bane of a teacher’s life but at least I only had to input the data once. The trouble is, SIMS (and other similar software) is very expensive.

Any ideas?