Educational institutions find attendance tracking as one of the most important challenges in online learning. Thankfully, the development of technologies such as biometric authentication and online monitoring software has made it easier for teachers and school administration to keep track of their students’ class attendance. To ensure effective and efficient online learning, school attendance tracking is vital.
Online school attendance tracking does not only track attendance for students, but also provides many useful solutions to the teacher and administration staff. It saves them an ample amount of productive time.
Important Features of Online School Attendance Tracking That Make it Effective
Online attendance tracking systems are created with the objective of providing an efficient way for teachers to analyze student performance and progress. Researches show that when students participate in a class, their understanding and skills improve. Online tracking systems incorporate essential features that ensure student attendance and good performance.
Attendance Management
Online attendance is hard to track using manual means. That is why the use of a tracking system is important. There are three types of participation-tracking mechanisms that are involved in taking students participation, including:
- Radio-Frequency Identification, which uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to students
- Biometrics
- Mobile apps
All these methods don’t need teacher’s involvement. Attendance tracking software not only tracks student participation. but also creates reports immediately.
Student Record
Managing school attendance records for a lot of students is stressful and time consuming. Attendance tracking systems securely stores records of performance and examination results. You can upload any aspect of the student’s education progress for easy access and draw conclusions when necessary.
Examination Record
Managing examination records is a big part of school management. With school attendance tracking, teachers can see how students perform in a clear and easy way. This is effective when it comes to grading the students at the end of the semester or course duration. Teachers can also load examination schedules on the tracking system for students to effectively plan and prepare for the exams.
SMS Alerts
You can easily let parents know everything about their child’s progress at school. With hectic schedules, no parent has time to attend lengthy PTA meetings. This is the reason why it is important to send the information of students directly to their parents. It saves time for both the parent and the teacher.
What Makes Online Attendance Tracking Efficient in Learning Institutions?
The effectiveness of educational institutions is not only in the professionalism but the relevance of the knowledge taught. Adopting student tracking software is an efficient way to ensure excellent delivery of learning materials and tracking student performance. The data provided by the systems is essential in providing insights to student problems and how they can be handled to ensure success.
Fast and better communication between parents and teachers
With online school attendance tracking, parents can stay informed on the daily activities their kids do in school. Parent/guardian and teacher communication is an essential aspect in any educational institution. Online attendance tracking captures all the local data of the students and sends it to the student information system instantly.
Comfort and time saving
It takes approximately 10 minutes to take manual class attendance. Those 10 minutes are wasted because there is nothing productive done by the students or the teacher. Such a scenario is where online attendance tracking comes in handy. The entire attendance checking process becomes effortless and will save plenty of time. Teachers can use biometrics or RFID to record attendance automatically, which is better than the manual process.
This saves a significant amount of time that teachers can use for focusing on students, while creating a better teaching and learning environment.
Simplifying Attendance Tracking Process
There are a many ways to track attendance. While most people prefer pen and paper, it can be unreliable without pre-printed barcodes for scanning. With the help of technology, teachers can streamline and improve attendance taking and reducing errors. Technology provides an easy way to take attendance, no matter where the lesson takes place. It allows you to automate attendance tracking by incorporating biometric, log in systems and RFID systems, which help teachers to evaluate student performances better.
Security and safety
A well implemented attendance system provides security to the daily operations and safety of the students. All the information about the student is securely stored in protected cloud servers. Manipulation of the cloud database students, parents or lecturers is impossible. There are multiple layers of security for the data to ensure the data is not lost or edited.
The push notification to parents or guardians informing them of their kids progress in school and absence helps maintain discipline and proper involvement in the education of their kids.
Support Reporting and Evaluation
With online school attendance tracking, the progress of students can be automatically generated and sent to the parents directly. You don’t have to worry about paperwork or tedious grading calculations. Once the report is generated, you can share it with the parents easily. This helps the teachers save a significant amount of time that would have been spent compiling, keying data and double checking for potential errors.
Improved student and teacher assessment
Attendance tracking gathers data across various schools and processes the data in an easy to read way for better understanding. Tracking of students’ progress online help teachers to ensure the education process works according to expectations. Modern tracking systems allow instructors to see how long learners are taking to understand a particular concept and how much progress the students make every week or semester. Teachers can analyze this data to understand which areas of the course cause the most struggle for specific students.
It also allows instructors to gauge whether there chosen studying program ensures excellent performance. If not, the assessment can provide insights to further improvements.
Technology in education helps keep student engaged
The young generation love technology. The generation of technological learners will be more than willing to use smartphones as part of the learning process. Modern online school attendance tracking is compatible with mobile phones and it can help you use the widespread use of technology in the education process.
For instance, you can make learning interactive and fun by using the right approach which goes beyond the use of textbooks, notebooks and pencils. You can introduce competitive questions and polls to keep students engaged. The ability to compare academic progress with other students allows teachers to introduce a competitive environment and make learners more engaged.
Schools can also take advantage of the use of smartphones to send smart alerts and mobile notification to students to help then keep up to date on important class events and information. In case of changes in the timetable the students can be easily informed and ensure they have a good class attendance record.
Attendance tracking helps implement adaptive learning practices
Students have different learning abilities and ways of understanding concepts. Some students have to spend a lot of time with a textbook while others can understand the concept during the lesson. School attendance tracking produces performance reports, which help teachers define an educational approach that is comfortable and works for different students. This kind of data is useful in creating adaptive learning programs and implementing competency-based education techniques (CBE).
CBE allows teachers to develop an individual-focused approach to learning. If a student requires to spend more time on a subject, a teacher can create a personalized learning plan.
Attendance tracking provides teachers with the ability to review data such as,
- Students point average
- Study progress of student
- Progress of a particular learner based on attendance of various subjects
This allows instructors to quickly understand student’s performance and attendance behavior and come up with an effective way to ensure educational success.
Better discipline and grades
It is a proven case study that a well-monitored school attendance has better discipline and grades. This is because school attendance tracking incorporates parents to the educational life of their kids. The parents are well informed on their kid’s absenteeism and performance giving them an opportunity to over direction and discipline their kids. In addition, when students are aware that their attendance is being tracked live and communicated to their parents, they will avoid any kind of indiscipline. Better disciplined students produce better results.
The performance assessment also helps teachers to come up with a well thought-out approach that will make each and every student to understand the course better. And better understanding results in better grades.
Reduces attendance errors
Human error is inevitable when working on attendance reports. This might be costly especially when you want to use the student’s attendance record to look for funding. Online attendance tracking helps the school administration to reduce the errors in participation data and gives teachers peace of mind that their records are accurate.
Assist in meeting attendance goals
Built-in attendance reports can help you spot areas where need improvement in your course delivery method. For instance, if you notice certain class activities have low participation, you can determine the potential problems of the activity and how to improve. Consequently, this helps teachers to meet their course and attendance goals.
Flexibility and Suppleness
Attendance tracking systems are easily scalable, depending on the size of the educational institution. They are completely flexible and can be adjusted to the school requirement.
Conclusion
An education institution that generates a lot of student data should define effective ways of extracting useful insights from it. A good tracking system for absenteeism provides easy access to metrics like student’s attendance and performance on certain activities based on detailed data analysis. As a result, you get a clear view of student progress in the course and save time in the process. This has greatly improved the efficiency of education institutions and development of more flexible education programs.