Topic 199

Software in school administration: record keeping, scheduling, Intranets, public information by Sung-Hwan

There is a huge amount of information in school, and it keeps growing at every moment. At every moment information is created: Test grades, Student attitudes, School schedules, an event, and etc. It would be difficult to keep track of all this information with out the use of computers. It is such a help that computers can store a large amount of information in relatively small area, and it also manages to organize the information neatly.

By keeping the records inside the computer, records could be stored in a small area with well organization. Thus, it would help the teachers when they are trying to look back at the records in the future. Unlike the papers, the computer would allow teachers to find the records very fast, also in organized order. For example, if an English teacher was trying to look for the 10th grade English test taken back at first quarter, all he have to do is turn on his computer, then open the folder with a name, “10th grade English test scores (First Quarter)”. Then he would find excel with a column for names of the 10th grade students in alphabetical order, and their test grades. However, if a teacher used papers to record the test grades, he would have a lot of discomfort and troubles finding the test grades.

First of all, the teacher has to look for the folder that contains the test scores. If it was a computer, it would take at most 2 minutes. Where else, for the papers, he would have to look for the folder that contains the test grades. This work would be quite time consuming, because the papers take a lot of spaces. Also, it might not be in a order, so it is not really convenient to look at.

But the problem with saving information in computer is that there might be a loss in the information. For example, if somehow the computer is destroyed, then all the information is lost. At this case the advantage of being able to save a lot of information into a small area became a disadvantage also. But, the solution to this problem is to save the information in other places, such as flash disk, or CD-Rom, to use it as a ‘back up’.

Also, the computer could benefit for scheduling. A teacher could easily use the Microsoft word to draw the scheduling tables. Then, he could try out other kinds of scheduling to see which one works the most. But in the case with out the use of computer, it is hard to tryout other kinds of scheduling, since every time you have to erase the mark rewrite the scheduling. Therefore, the computer could do the work faster and conveniently.

Intranet is a website that is a private computer network. Therefore, only person with the authorization can go to into this intranet. This could be of great use in the school, if there was information that would like to be kept secure from others, such as student’s profile. Therefore, only teachers would be able to go inside in the intranet and find the information needed, where else the students or others outside the school can’t. Though, the problem with this is that if others know the authorization number or password, then they could easily go into intranet and look at the information also.

Using computers would also benefit in the case of public information. The computer will allow the teachers to produce faster information sheet, like the morning bulletin. It is faster to type up a paper than to write out. Also, the computer allows us to print out many pages by just typing once.

Consequently, computers let teachers able to do works faster and more efficiently than working without the aid of computers. I believe that the technology will develop further more, letting us able to do be more convenient and fast in not only in school administration, but all other subjects as well.