Remember when you marked the roll using the old government-issue roll books? As you marked the roll, you could easily see patterns of attendance. Sadly, nearly all current electronic attendance roll marking software robs teachers of that ability.

Because we’re teachers, we understand that identifying students who may be absent for consecutive days, skipping school on assessment days, or know they will be away in the near future, can be really important. In Teachers’ Assistant, you can see it all simply and easily while you’re marking the roll.

Carey Baptist College, Western Australia, recently had a visit from a Commonwealth auditor, who examined their attendance records. Rowan Clark, Middle and Senior School Principal, recounts the experience:

After seeing the attendance records and the Teachers’ Assistant attendance system, the auditor commented that this was the best live attendance system he had seen in a school. He was not only impressed by the system itself, but also commented that this was the first time he had audited a school that had all of its absences resolved for the day of the audit.

Carey Baptist College doesn’t use sirens to mark lesson breaks, and Assistant Principal Tony Severin reports that since the introduction of Teachers’ Assistant, classes after break times are consistently running around five minutes early, where before they were generally running five minutes late.

Because it’s so easy for teachers to enter notes about students in Teachers’ Assistant, they do! Anecdotal observations, low level behaviour issues, formal reprimands – whatever they want to enter, they can. Easily.

This results in the creation of tens of thousands of records each year, where most ‘behaviour management’ systems record only data about serious behavioural incidents. But don’t worry – the volume of records doesn’t mean lots of time wasted sifting through the data.

That’s because Teachers’ Assistant has an unparallelled ability to help you identify patterns of behaviour, and intervene at an early stage, preventing myriad minor issues from escalating into major issues.

Getting the parents involved at an early stage helps to get them on-side, and change can happen more quickly. Happy students, happy parents, happy teachers!

A day planner that fills itself in – inconceivable? Not at all!

The Teachers’ Assistant Day Planner

The day planner is automatically populated each day with programme details, assessments, linked resources, homework, and so on.

A notepad is also included, allowing you to keep notes on each class.

Teachers’ Assistant Mobile Attendance (TAMA) is the simplest, most effective way to mark your roll in classes, like Physical Education, where a conventional computer or laptop is unavailable.

TAMA runs on any web-enabled device, such as the iPhone.

TAMA is included as part of Teachers’ Assistant, providing flexibility in roll marking and, when connected to a 3G network, the option to mark rolls while off campus.

Designed to work on any web-enabled handheld device, such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, mobile phones, and PDAs, TAMA is simple to operate and is light enough to work on slow data connections.

Writing teaching programmes is easier than using a word processor.

Entering programme details in Teachers’ Assistant

You don’t need any word-processing skills to produce professional-looking programmes and course outlines. Writing teaching-learning programmes is easier and quicker than it has ever been.

You can programme lesson-by-lesson, week-by-week, in blocks, or in modules. Assessments are linked into the programme, and resources such as documents, presentations, movies, and websites are embedded. State or system curriculum can be pre-loaded and searched for relevant content. The new draft National Curriculum is preloaded, making managing the change that much easier for schools using SEQTA software.

So much has changed over the last twenty years. Once, we just wrote our teaching-learning programmes, went to class, and taught; we marked assessments and put them into our marks books. Apart from writing academic reports, that was about it!

Now we have to worry about things like legal challenges to our assessment of student performance, curriculum mapping, putting course materials and content online, continuous reporting, and much more.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Teachers’ Assistant turns the clock back twenty years in terms of teachers’ workloads. As a teacher, you just need to write your programme, set assessments, and enter your marks: we take care of the rest for you.

The result is that you spend less time performing mundane tasks, and more time teaching.

Find out more about SEQTA’s support for the National Curriculum.

Let’s face it: bullying is a difficult thing to combat in school. Teachers’ Assistant can help schools track bullying, and using the data collected, you can make informed decisions about how best to manage it on a case-by-case basis.

We all understand that bullying may not manifest itself as a big incident. Often, it can just be a series of small things that, when considered together, consistute bullying.

Teachers’ Assistant uses well-researched data-collection strategies to allow you to track these minor incidents, and puts the pieces together to help you see patterns that may well constitute bullying.

SEQTA gives you the tools to manage bullying in your school.