Managing the school administration is a difficult task and is performed by multiple departments instead of justice one. There is proper coordination of various tools and software in the present digitalized way of managing a school administration. For example, there is an online attendance management software and a school ERP that is responsible for coordinating its admission portals, assignment portals, and so on.
Meaning of attendance management system
An attendance management software is a digitalized tool that performs various functions meant for recording and calculating the overall or average percentile of individual students, and average students in any given classroom. In simple terms, it is a device that can work as an online register a teacher might use. Teachers record the attendance of every student at the beginning of the class by role calling them, but an attendance management software works differently and automatically does the task of inputting student attendance details.
Working on attendance management system
An attendance management software works in two different ways;
- Records the presence of a child online when they join through a learning management system or portal.
- Records the attendance once students walk into the school campus through the attendance recording machine, by recording the barcode present on a card which might be a separate card for attendance identification or on the school identity card itself.
These are the two methods of a system for working and recording regular student attendance.
Benefits of an attendance management system
An attendance management system has multiple benefits, because of which a school ERP might adopt them and replace the official school staff that was responsible for calculating the average percentage of every child. Here are a few mentionable benefits that are the most noticed and seat for by school administrations;
Accuracy and speed of the software
Teachers can go wrong while calculating the percentage of attendance for students because human nature and human behavior are not expected to be accurately coordinated with what they wish to do. A machine, however, is fast enough to record attendance and does not waste time off the teachers and students by taking up a huge chunk of their learning time. It is also accurate because it will not record the attendance of a student who is not present, no matter how the students wish to hack the system into doing otherwise.
Generation of reports
Manually working teachers take a lot of time to calculate the overall present percentage of students because it needs inputting data constantly into other software and then put back the generated percentages on their report cards. The software does it more conveniently because it connects to the student data and constantly calculates the percentage.
Coordination
There are multiple stakeholders of attendance management software. This means that it needs active participation, cooperation, and coordination among the members concerned with giving the attendance and would like to receive reports on attendance percentages. The most important stakeholders are students who join every class and whose attendance is recorded and put into student details. Teachers access the data for calculating how well students perform in their classes as per their presence; and which students need reminders to attend classes regularly.
Other times, parents are also concerned with the presence of their children in a classroom. They are the guardians of students and monitor their children’s performance constantly, for which their presence in the class must also be monitored and maintained. With the help of an attendance management system, it is possible to keep each of these stakeholders in touch with the attendance details of students.
Punctuality of the system
Some teachers might forget to take attendance and look over their job because other tasks are more prioritized as checking off assignments, distribution, etc. It is difficult to repeat attendance calls after the class is over because students who have not attended the session might want to chip in.
Therefore, complete punctuality is not entirely expected of a teacher but is expected of software, machine, or system because it runs on data input and electricity, or other requirements as mentioned by the supplier of the attendance management software and not human behavior, emotion or mood. The sole task of the software is to record attendance, it is bound to be punctual in doing the job correctly.
