Attendance Management

As a future teacher I find myself thinking about ways that I can ensure my classroom runs itself, so that I can spend more time instructing, and less time focusing on the logistics, and general office work that it takes to run an organized classroom. Some teachers have aides, or classroom assistants, I have taken classes where a student is given responsibilities such as managing attendance and passing out or organizing classroom materials. I understand that can be a positive learning experience. however as this blog  generally focuses on technology use in education, I wanted to find apps and other resources for classroom management. Through the use of my PLN, and RSS feeds, I found an article discussing 3 apps for use specifically with classroom attendance.

The article is a simple posting of 3 handy apps that allow teachers different amounts of control from their mobile device or tablet. the apps are: K12 Attendance, Attendance Manager, and Teachers Aide.
All the apps allow the user to create a class, input names of students and then track their attendance to varying degrees, some even allowing to send texts or emails to absent students.

I also know that different schools, sometime school districts, have their own system of logging, recording, and processing data about student participation in school. So  apps like these seem redundant to me personally, unless the apps have a way to interface with the schools own proprietary system or software. These apps work great for organized extra curricular activities where attendance may not be as important to the schools main office, or for private schools or classrooms that do not have a central attendance system, or as a way to organize any group of people that meet on a regular basis.

Finally I would like to leave some questions to the reader, many of these classroom management apps are free, would it be prudent for schools to adopt use of them centrally? Are apps like these redundant and unnecessary? Do they have a place as educational tools for student TA's or aides as a middle man to the schools own system? It is great that people are developing software for this purpose, perhaps the development itself will drive further questions leading to more innovation. as always a link to the article is provided below.

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