- Plan out the time lines for next year NOW, in JUNE. We need to set these dates for each term: end of marking;due dates for all marks and comments; report card printing DAY for draft copies; next due date for all corrections; printing DAY for final copies.
- Get everyone to use email for file transfer if working at home, and stop relying on floppy disks.
- If a teacher can't do email transfer, then they must work at school.
We've got administrators finding mistakes that teachers should have caught. We've got teachers arriving at school with no data, or faulty data, and having to return home again because the deadline has passed. And, we've got the report card facilitator spending hours doing corrections that should have been taken care of by teachers.
The task of printing report cards is not a difficult task, nor should it consume more than a half a day. BUT, when the data does not come in at the same time, but instead it arrives piecemeal over a two week time period, with blurred time lines for drafts and finals, the task becomes a silly run around that takes all day for several days. This is because teachers are doing work under gun of time pressure and everything needs to be printed ASAP. Time lines go quickly to pieces when the data set is incomplete. One missed data set holds up the hold process.
We need realistic, comfortable deadlines that allow teachers and administrators the time to successfully transfer data and proofread. Printing should occur all at once.
The report card administrator should not be making corrections and reprints constantly over many days. All corrections should be caught by teachers and administrators after first draft printouts, data resubmitted after teachers make corrections on their eTeacher, then the final printouts are produced.
Here are some other observations:
- some teachers are uncomfortable with submitting data in specific ways, especially by email
- We should consider having some of our comments pre-approved. A little forethought on the comments we are going to use in our reports, and careful design of our comment library, would eliminate MOST of the editing problems.
- we should work more to build our comment library, and learn to export and save libraries of comments.
- our training on eTeacher can be sharpened: submitting data files, moving data files, emailing data files, backing up files, using floppy disks appropriately (ie. for back up only)
- many grad tasks should be done earlier in the year: e.g. grad certificates, subject awards.
Any comments?
