Whole school development,change and leadership - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 115

Characteristic Tools should:

Design
characteristics

· support communication between stakeholders, by
- being open to scrutiny by learners, teachers, parents and
management
- supporting blogging to engage and interact with parents and
learners
- being intuitive to use
- being easily updatable by whole school/college workforce
- sending alerts
· be simple and strongly visual e.g. outliers on graphs should be
highlighted, using a traffic-light system when learners are falling
behind or achieving well to enable target setting and half-termly
reporting
· provide immediate access and updates, by
-

providing feedback to learners and teachers on demand

- identifying irregular attendance patterns and communicating this to

teachers and parents

- being updatable quickly by the whole school/college workforce in

response to events

· provide one tool with multiple functions, and for multiple purposes e.g.
oFSTED, school/college, formative and summative needs. one teacher
reported having to work with four different systems.
· be comprehensive - provide management of all pupil data: e.g. SEn,
medical, child protection
· be Web-based - access has to be Web-based for parents and whole-
school/college workforce access
· be robust - 'one crash and everyone loses faith'
· be secure - 'one loss of privacy and everyone loses faith'
· be flexible - with high standards of interoperability between commonly
used packages - e.g. homework information on the learning platforms -
should be linked with homework returns by email and alerts about
homework missed
· allow staff appropriate access
-

Technical
characteristics

there are different levels of access depending on 'need to know'

- teachers need easy access to learner data useful for lesson

planning.

In choosing e-tools to support administration, accountability and monitoring,
care also needs to be taken to ensure:

• Pursuitofdatadoesnotreplacediscussionsbetweenteachersandlearners
about progress: . . . ticking boxes means a lot of qualitative information
is now lost . . . formerly teachers would meet at the year's end to discuss
the progress of individual learners and rich information would be passed
on. Now the focus is on data, which ticks other people's boxes rather than