How do you monitor attendance in your school or academy? Do you have a standardized way to track absences in classrooms? And how do you classify this information later on? Have you thought of upgrading this process with a specialized attendance management system? If not yet, maybe you need to have a look at the available options and see if there’s room for improvement in the way you carry out this day-to-day task.
Suppose you have a well-thought-out process as to how to deal with attendance record-keeping. There may be things that don’t work as well as you may have thought. And it gets better; there may be things that may have not come to your attention. At least, not yet.
So, let’s take a closer look at some different scenarios and questions that may arise from them; and try to see if any of these matches with your case.
How do you monitor attendance?
In the absence of a relevant specialized software solution, you may be repeating tasks that cause delays, add extra workload, or even block important decisions from being made.
Tracking absences
The first step of the process is to take attendance in classrooms, right? And you probably have delegated this task to your teachers. What are they requested to do? Are they writing down absences on paper? If yes, this probably comes with extra hassles, such as remembering to distribute the relevant forms, collecting them at the end of each period, etc. Isn’t that a kind of a “shoddy” and obsolete way of handling information?
Recordkeeping: absences log file
Once you’ve taken the absences, what should you do with this information? Are these records classified using a log of paper records or do you register this information on a central software system? Is it useful to store this information in a system that keeps teachers out of the loop? The way we see it, storing attendance data on an isolated system is probably not that helpful; as it only helps manage attendance information in retrospect.
Teachers
What if you hold your teachers accountable, not only for taking attendance but also for taking care of these records later on? Is that really helpful? Is it really what you need?
Wouldn’t it be more helpful for them to be focused on their educational objectives and how to improve teaching? Or even if your teachers should, indeed, be responsible for taking attendance, shouldn’t they have access to this data, afterward?
Which scenario matches your case?
Parents
And what about parents? How easy is it for you to inform parents and guardians immediately of their children’s absences? Are you sure the process you have established to monitor attendance makes it easy for you to act on time and notify parents accordingly? And what about the periodical parent briefing? Is attendance information easily and readily available?
If the above strikes a chord and has you wondering as to what you need to do, then stay with me.
Below, I’ll be proposing a new way to manage all these issues, with efficiency. DreamClass does the trick for you and helps monitor attendance in the easiest possible way. Let’s find out more.
How you can monitor attendance with DreamClass
With DreamClass, teachers, administrators, and parents they all get in the loop. What does that mean? Well, attendance records are no longer an issue that administrators need to handle using isolated systems, as described above. Neither are teachers burdened any longer with tracking students and storing information about attendance later on. And the best part, as you’ve probably guessed, is that absence records are no longer on paper. Absences for each class are stored on the cloud; where administrators and teachers can get access to use that information, whenever needed. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you cannot print the relevant records; quite the opposite is true. For example, you may have the relevant reports for each student’s performance, along with their attendance records printed or forwarded to parents.
That’s it for an overview of how DreamClass helps you monitor attendance.
Monitoring attendance
Now let’s focus on the process of tracking attendance and see if it can become more efficient. There are two ways to monitor your school’s attendance in classrooms, and you may choose whichever way is more helpful for your school. So, here it is, in a nutshell:
- Teachers can register absences using their classroom computers, right before they start the lesson. This way all absences are being registered in DreamClass and are immediately available to administrators, to further proceed with any next steps. That is really helpful, especially when students are children; their parents and guardians need to be aware of their absence.
- Alternatively, administrators or personnel responsible for student attendance may visit each classroom and take attendance, as usual. A laptop or tablet would probably help do it faster.
There are benefits to using DreamClass to monitor attendance. There’s no need to visit each classroom to make sure that all students are attending the class. Otherwise, you may continue monitoring attendance the way you did till now, especially if teachers in classrooms are not yet equipped with computers.
Keep your fingers on the pulse
Upgrade now the way you monitor attendance in your school; and help administrators be in the know with that crucial information.
Try DreamClass for free; see how you can make attendance-monitoring way more efficient!
