Student Management System
Concept 1In reaction to our school's choice of Student Management System I started knocking up ideas for interfaces that would allow teachers to see the sorts of information they needed in class. The idea is to hide as much of the functionality as possible and make the interface contextual. Ideally this would then feed information back to a Government approved system.
I see it as being open source. Schools have enough financial issues without adding more to the mix.
This is the first screen a teacher should see when they hit a classroom:
- the current attendance for the class - defaults to attending so the teacher can set the few students to absent.
- links to class lists which would give individual student info
- Reports for attendance allowing the teacher quick access to a full record for students, Reports so a teacher can add behavioural and learning information on the fly, Tutor Group so the teacher can access info about specific students in their pastoral care.
- Alerts: any information for students related to the teacher (tutor group, class etc) - showing stand-downs, sickness etc.
Outline
I also feel that a lot of the SMSs seem to be making things more complex than they need to be. My feeling is that there are a limited number of elements in a school - things like Students, Resources, Courses (and related things like assessment) - and then a set of relationships between those things. The relationships are where things get complex and are different between schools (but only in terms of focus). With this in mind I started outlining the basics of what I see a SMS needing to include: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhnqpzbr_2dmj3rcc3