School Management Systems ICT IGCSE School Management Systems

Objectives have an understanding of a wider range of work-related ICT applications and their effects, including school management systems: registration records reports resources

Schools have to manage many different sets of data: Pupil information (name, contact details, etc.) Staff information (name, bank details for pay, etc.) Timetable (rooms, times, subject, staff, classes, etc.) Pupil attainment (marks, grades, comments, etc.) Pupil behaviour (dates, incidents, notes, etc.) Administration data (letters, forms, etc.) Financial records (wages, fees, etc.) Exam entries (times, dates, pupils, results, etc.)

Rather than use lots of different systems to manage this information, many schools use a School Management System (sometimes called a School Information System, or SIS). This is a system that manages all of a school's data in a single, integrated application.

Registration Registers used to be written by hand Mistakes are messy Can be difficult to read Very hard to analyze

Why use computers? Records are more clear & more accurate Centrally stored for ease of access by teachers & SMT No paper copies to get lost or damaged Facilitates analysis: percentage absence/number of absences/absence by gender or class etc Information can be seamlessly integrated into reports

Records Having all of the information in a single system allows schools to more easily connect data together. For example, when viewing a pupil's record, the user could follow a link to the pupil's class, and from there a link to the pupil's teacher, and from there a link to the teacher's other classes, and so on.

These connections between sets of data allow complex tasks to easily be performed such as: Sending letters to all parents of pupils who scored below 50% in their last English test Printing personalised timetables for IGCSE pupils (even though they have all chosen different options) Monitoring the progress of pupils in multiple subjects, over a number of years

Teachers are able to: Record test marks & homework scores Record comments about progress Track students’ progress Analyze performance & attendance data Write reports, and format/edit them online

As you can imagine, School Management Systems are pretty complex As you can imagine, School Management Systems are pretty complex. Most systems are based on a complex relational database. The database contains many tables of data, each table having many records and many fields. What data might a Student table hold?

An Example... An example of a part of a typical school database showing the different data tables, the fields within each table, and the relationships between the tables:

School Reports A school would typically keep data on student academic performance in a computerised database. This would allow the school to easily track how students were doing as the year progressed, as well as making the creation of printed reports very easy (compared to hand writing every report)

A typical school report database might contain: Student ID Name Tutor group Grades for Term 1 Attendance for Term 1 Comments by teachers for Term 1 Grades for Term 2 Etc.

Most database programs allow data to be presented in attractively design reports that can include headers and footers, school logos, etc.

You might think that your report is written just for you, but often this is not entirely true... Many school reporting systems allow teachers to select pre-written comments from a 'comment bank'. So those 'personal' comments on your report are actually from a database - they were just the comments that best matched you!

Resources Networks Interactive whiteboards Internet CD ROMs Video Audio Projectors VLEs