Thinking of switching to a new way of tracking attendance in your school? If so, you’re in the right place! With an online attendance system, like DreamClass, you’ll manage to make attendance tracking and management much more efficient.
So, what method have you been using, in order to track and manage attendance in your school? Was it an on-premise — and, thus, potentially obsolete — school management system? Have you been struggling with ad-hoc — and, yet, time-consuming — solutions, such as google sheets? Or was it grinding paperwork? Old school or not, with an online attendance system like DreamClass, you’ll now manage attendance in a breeze.
An online attendance tracking requires no tedious, repetitive tasks
With an online attendance system, like DreamClass, you no longer need to prepare multiple Excel sheets — for each one of your lessons — in advance; and have them printed, in order to take attendance within the classroom. All you have to do is schedule your lessons online, in advance; and, then, allow for teachers to login to their account, where they can just fill in attendance data in the available slots.
Teachers are able to work on scheduled lessons that correspond to the courses they’re responsible for; and which are visible on their personalized calendars. Alternatively, they may just jot down the names of the students that were absent and follow the same data entry steps, later on. Or, they may pass them on to the administrators responsible for attendance tracking. Once attendance data is filled in there, it will also be available to teachers, administrators, students and guardians. That is to say, administrators and teachers no longer need to spend any extra time to share attendance data with all parties involved; they’re now all able to view the same information in their portals.
So, tracking attendance requires you to have your digital schedules prepared in advance; and that’s pretty easy to do in DreamClass.
How does an online attendance system like DreamClass work?
Attendance tracking in DreamClass starts with the scheduling process itself. That is to say, in order to track attendance, you’ll first need to set up your school classes and courses; and, thus, have your lessons scheduled in your digital environment. Having done that, you’ll then be able to track attendance and work on attendance data, with ease; and without wasting time in unnecessarily repeating any of the steps.
Schedule your lessons online, in seconds; and have them ready to track attendance
With DreamClass, you can schedule your lessons in the blink of an eye. More specifically, you have the following options, as to how you can schedule your lessons on your digital calendar:
1. Create lessons one by one
This approach is useful in case your school or academy offers one-off lessons and you need to schedule them one at a time, at different dates and times. With an online attendance system like DreamClass, this is easy as pie. You just add a teaching session on a preferred date, specifying the start-time, duration and lesson title.
2. Use the recurring rule functionality, to schedule multiple lessons at once
If you need to add multiple — or recurring — occurrences of lessons on your digital calendar in one step, you can do it with DreamClass. The user interface makes it a breeze; with the pertinent form fields that allow you to schedule lessons on specific week days, for a specific date range; and with specific intervening time (weekly/biweekly) in-between.
In either case, you’ll be able to track attendance in seconds, simply by working on each one of your lessons’ instances, as described below.
Track attendance with ready-made lesson forms
Getting to the core functionality of an online attendance system, like DreamClass, it’s worth-focusing on how lesson forms work. In short, with lesson forms you manage to partially automate attendance tracking. Put another way, you make attendance tracking a routine task that takes only a few clicks to completion. In particular, all you have to do is work on your ready-made, editable forms, containing all student names participating in that lesson instance; and track attendance en masse. All in all, it’s easy as pie to take attendance for a lesson that is already added on your calendar; you just change its status to “completed” and mark all students as “present”, at once. Two clicks and you’re done! But wait, there’s more!
Attendance functionality in an online attendance system like DreamClass, helps you work on your students’ attendance data in detail — or en masse. That is to say, alternatively to what was mentioned above, you may mark all students at once, with ‘unexcused absence’, ‘excused absence’, ‘expulsion’, ‘late’ or ‘unspecified’. These are, essentially, all the available attendance statuses you can use to track attendance, in each one of your classes. Then, you may work further on each student’s attendance data, to make adjustments, if needed. Edit each student’s attendance data, one by one, adding comments or specifying the “minutes late”, if that’s the case.
Summing it up
With an online attendance system, like DreamClass, attendance tracking and attendance management become a breeze. With it, you’ll manage to schedule your lessons online and release yourself and your colleagues from less productive, obsolete systems, paperwork and complicated attendance sheets you may have been using, so far. You now have all of the digital lesson forms created for your entire school period; thus, you’re able to take attendance en masse, add comments on each students’ attendance record and even add pertinent details, such as how late they’ve run.
