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Welcome to Ed Tech Tuesday. I'm Jennifer Gibson
And I'm Rich Dixon. We're going to look at TeacherKit,
Which is a great classroom management tool, which allows you to
Track attendance, behavior, and it also has a grade book inside of it
So let's get started. I've already built up a class. I did that by clicking on
The "plus" button
I'm not gonna take the time in this demo to do that. I'm going to start with a geometry
Class - of course this would be more
Geared for secondary use. We see a virtual classroom, walk through the door
And then
Here are some sample students, and what's wonderful about this is
If I start the day, I can click attendance along the top, and then I can take
Attendance by simply
Selecting each student. If they're not there for some reason
Let's say Ken Eckham decides not to show up or he's sick, I can tap twice and it
Has an absence. And you can see the other students that have been absent in the past there
As well already marked
I can take notes as well
If I see everybody's there, I can bypass that system of tapping everyone
And in the upper righthand corner select "Attended"
And boom, we're there. Again it's easy to clear it, I can make some notes if there's
Anything unusual about that day, if there are a lot of absences or we happen to have a snow day
Something along those lines, if the bus is late, whatever it is
And real quick, I'm imagining there's some reporting somewhere
Because we're keeping track of this. Unfortunately, you can export it
In what's known as a CSV file for those of you
That have experience with that. So it does not tie in with any other
Attendance system, but you can
Export the information and put it into excel. Exactly, into a box, or if you're using
Another
School information system, you can easily do that
And pass that email along to whomever in your front office if that's
Part of their tasks. So, under behavior
What I like about this, in this case here we can see that we have one
Ken Okutake has a behavior problem
In a particular case, in this case, I made a note of the behavioral problem. You can
Do this on the fly
By clicking plus, you can see it's positive, negative, or if you just wanna make some
Observations notes,
Which I think is very flexible again, which is great, for there are certain
Students where you are kind of keeping a record of
Their behavior and you want to be able to share that with others, their parents,
With them
These are things that you can make throughout the day. That is a really nice
Feature. That's really nice, especially
When it comes time to reporting back to parents. One feature they don't
Have, that I have yet to see within this
App anyway, would be the ability to email directly from here, so, if there
Is a problem, that you would immediately have an email go
Out to the parent because there's a section when you add the students in there
That asks for both the student's
Information, as well as the parent's email. And let's look at the last section, which
Is the grade book.
Can I just interrupt real quick? One thing, as we make recommendations and
As you look at apps, it's really important to note that you can always go into the
Developer's site
And leave your feedback and requests for the app
Because developers are watching those particular comments and making
improvements all the time. So I just want to encourage you to do that as an educator
Out there
Because they want to build it for for you. Absolutely, and if it's difficult trying
To find who created or developed the app
You can always go to the iTunes store and search, and you can leave a comment about
The app
And the developers do you try to read those as much as possible
Let's take a look here. I've set up again this classroom. I have some
Unit tests that I've mocked up and
A quiz that's been weighted here, and you can see that it's very easy to go
Through and
Just get a quick list there. I can add more
Gradable items inside of here as well, if I'd like to do that
And again, you can weight things so it's very very easy to do. Now with the grade book again, is that
A CSV file?
Yes it is, absolutely. So you can export that, which
Is really nice. You can sort
By name, by grades even
So you can get a comparison of where students are falling. I'll go ahead and
Return to take a look at
Dropbox, because when you go to export
Any of that student information, it goes to a Dropbox file. If you're not familiar with Dropbox, you
Can visit Dropbox.com
It's a cloud-based or a remote computer storage solution
That allows you to take an export, remove content
And grades from here to outside. It is a really nice feature, but they would have to have an account
They would have to have that set up already. A couple other things here under
Settings
You can take a look, there's attendance thresholds, the
Number of periods you might have that you want to grade within there, and
Lots of customization features that I think are really really helpful
If you want to rate this app, what you do there is leave comments
For the developer, based off what you were talking about earlier, you can certainly do that
That's a quick overview of TeacherKit