From inception, the Hall Monitor mobile application was designed to facilitate the daily work of education professionals by providing instant access to important student information. Having delivered an app that did just that, and in speaking with school administrators and teachers, emAPP recognized an additional area where inefficiencies existed in the traditional ways that administrative tasks were carried out, that being the difficulty teachers were having taking attendance manually or with a laptop.
In its commitment to continually improve Hall Monitor and facilitate the work of educational professionals, one of the big improvement projects to Hall Monitor during 2015 consisted of creating an attendance taking module. The driving force behind this enhancement was the need for authorized school personnel to take attendance as quickly and easily as possible so that children missing from class could be quickly identified and steps taken to ensure their safety. This module would address that need by allowing authorized users to take attendance for their classes throughout the day in real time on any mobile device.
Phase l: Information Gathering / Planning
Several steps were necessary in the development of this module, the first of which was information gathering. If we were going to build an attendance taking module that would address not only the speed and ease necessary but have the flexibility needed to accommodate all attendance taking needs and scenarios that could arise, then we would need to know first hand what these were.
Because these specific requirements were crucial to the development of an efficient attendance taking module, we approached several partners in various school boards and districts, asking for their input. Our main area of questioning concerned the functional needs of attendance taking, including:
- Whether attendance could be changed after submission;
- Is it possible to take attendance before the course begins, or after the course ends?;
- Is it assumed that if no absences are noted, then the whole class was present?
In conducting our information gathering, we found that in several instances the needs expressed by the different contributors were not at all similar. One thing was clear, however – that attendance taking had to be simple, fast and not interfere with the teaching of the course.
With the help of our partners, we obtained several scenarios of attendance taking, and proceeded to develop responses to these through Hall Monitor.
Whether:
- a late student,
- a return to class with a tardy slip (after a tardy sweep),
- a student passing by the secretary’s office before going to class,
- or a justified absence,
each scenario was considered in building the attendance taking module. Additionally, the Hall Monitor app would have to confirm that attendance was sent by the mobile device and received by the backend server.
To maximize speed and efficiency, we opted for a very simple process, which we call Touch Attendance, that would allow attendance taking from any mobile device by simply pressing on a student’s picture to change his/her attendance status. The module would record information such as status, reason, time (for a late student) and a comment. In planning, we also opted to develop this module in an incremental manner, starting with a first prototype (Phase ll of development), in order to have quick feedback from the school boards and districts.