Taking a register is one task certain teachers do every day, in primary school this is often the start of the day and even in secondary school attendance has to be monitored. This is less common in higher education where the responsibility of being present is no longer lawfully required. This task that the teachers are required to perform is one which lends itself well for being automated and in fact it has now become automated within the primary school my children attend. On Google Classroom they now answer a question every day (of schooling) along these lines:

This has become automated now, because schooling is currently done at a distance and the children need to log into Google classroom to find their daily work and to chat to their teacher or their classmates. This is one teacher function that seems very easy to automate. Rather than having a class call every day to see which students are present, the teacher adds a question to the stream of work the kids need to look at for the day and the teacher can easily see how many kids are present and what their answer is in one glance. Even when children go back to face to face teaching, the pupils can sign in on a screen or device when they get to class. This information could be sent to the school office and the administrators there could then use this information to compare against those who have called in absent.

It sounds simple and effective, but would it really be a time saving exercise? The teacher will still look around the class when all the pupils have come in, she will still need to make a mental note of absent pupils for the day ahead; this could make a difference with the classwork that has been planned or if the children are working in groups or pairs. So even though it might save paperwork or even time in some cases, it wouldn’t change the mental process the teacher goes through when greeting the class. It could even slow the process down in some ways because no formal register is taking place, meaning the teacher will need to perform the mental check while maybe doing other things.

I think this is a good example of the ambivalence of adding technology to the class room where it looks like a good solution has been found to speed up an everyday task that teachers have. In reality, though, adding this technology way does not necessarily alleviate the teachers’ workload. Although a system like this might be useful for the administration of the school, it could be seen as a duplication of the teachers work.

Taking a register / Femke Morrison / An introduction to digital environments for learning (2020/2021)[SEM2] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0