Shifting the Paradigm: Using Skyward to Take

Positive AttendancePresented by Dan Hoerl and Shane Been

The Evolution of How Teachers Take Attendance at Sauk Prairie High School

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, teachers would manually take attendance by marking the students who were absent on a form that could be scanned.

Next, they would take this form and hang it outside their classroom door on a clip. Each hour, office workers would walk the school, collect the forms, and scan them to record the attendance.

The Next Step: Computerized Attendance!With the advent of the twenty-first century

came a major change in how attendance was recorded- instead of the office gathering attendance, teachers now entered who was missing or tardy for their classes directly into Skyward.

What does ‘taking attendance’ mean?

Taking attendance has traditionally meant recording those students who are tardy or absent from class and why. If a student is not marked absent, he or she is presumed to be present.

Study Hall ChangesAround 2002, an incentive program was

introduced for juniors and seniors. If students met certain criteria, they would not be assigned to a specific location for study hall. Instead, they would be able to select daily where they wanted to go that period from either:

- The cafeteria- The library- The resource room- Or leave campus

The Reaction?• The students loved the flexibility and freedom

that this gave them.• The attendance secretary hated it. Why?

Attendance was managed by having students physically sign a piece of paper at the four locations. These papers were then collected, and she had to try to decipher the signatures, figure out who was present, and then go into Skyward attendance for that study hall and mark who was absent.

The Consequences of the Change

• It became a powerful motivator for the students to meet the required criteria.

• This process alone added 2-3 hours of work each day for the attendance secretary.

• The attendance was not extremely accurate due to students signing in for others and other reasons.

• Due to the positive results for students, the program was continued.

The Advent of RTI

• The concept of Response to Intervention (RTI) arose toward the end of the past decade.

• In response to RTI, we deemed it crucial that students be able to work with their teachers during a study hall.

• In our current structure, however, it was hit and miss whether a teacher and a student were both available the same period.

The Creation of ARP

• To alleviate the issue of students not being guaranteed to have access to their teacher, we decided to implement an Academic Resource Period (ARP).

• We changed our schedule from an 8 class period day to a 7 class period day with an ARP in the morning.

• During ARP, virtually every student will have access to virtually every teacher almost every day.

The Mechanics of ARP

• Freshman and sophomores are assigned to report to a homeroom, and then are free to go to any other classroom to work with a teacher.

• Juniors and seniors are free to report to any available teacher in the building, the library or to cafeteria to study or to socialize. During the period, they are allowed to change locations as needed for additional help.

‘Houston, we have a problem.’

• As we prepared to implement ARP and the new schedule, everything looked ready to go: the teachers were on board,

students’ schedules were adjusted, and room assignments were prepared.

• One issue stood in the way: how were we going to take the initial attendance of over 400 upperclassmen who could choose to go initially to 50 different locations?

Shifting the Paradigm

We quickly realized that we were going to have to view ‘taking attendance’ differently; instead of recording the students missing from an assigned location during ARP (negative attendance), we needed to record the students who were present at any of the approved locations (positive attendance).

Negative versus Positive Attendance

• In negative attendance, the default status of a student is present. Only students who are absent need to be recorded.

• In positive attendance, the default status of a student is absent. Every student who is present needs to be recorded.

Taking Positive Attendance: Simple, right?

• The urgent question quickly arose:

How are we going to accomplish this?• We quickly ruled out having upperclassmen sign

in at each location. Based on our previous experience, we knew that we would not be able to record accurate attendance nor did the attendance secretary have the time to do this.

• We determined we needed a computerized solution.

What program to use?

• We first determined that we could not use Skyward as it is designed to record attendance negatively.

• We then investigated a variety of programs, each with their own strengths and unique features.

• However, one glaring issue was constant with each program- all of our student data is in Skyward. How was Skyward and the new program going to be able to interact with each other, preferably in real-time?

Coming Back to Skyward…

• We decided to give Skyward another try. For the sake of our technology department and our staff, we determined that we wanted to use Skyward to be consistent and to allow our data to be collected in real-time with the rest of the day’s attendance

• Working with Justin Anderson, Student Product Specialist at Skyward, and Dan Hoerl from School Technology Associates, Inc., a solution was cobbled together, tested, and implemented in time for the first day of school.

The Solution

• Every morning, the attendance secretary uses a utility and marks every upperclassmen absent from the ARP study hall section they are assigned to that period.

• During ARP, every teacher, along with several stations in the cafeteria and library, goes to Wanding within Attendance in Student Management.

The Solution (continued)

• Using a keypad, students enter their id number.• The teacher verifies the student and presses

enter.• At that point, the students’ presence and location

for the period is recorded for the section.• This happens simultaneously at over 50 locations

throughout the school in less than three minutes.

The Results

• The implementation of this solution has been very effective and positive.

• Teachers required some training, but quickly learned how to record attendance in this manner.

• If a student needs to be found during this hour, they can be quickly found.

• The way we record data allows us to track how many students are going to specific locations.

Expanded Use

• After seeing how it was working, we immediately implemented this same process in Skyward to take attendance during regular study halls as described earlier.

• The weight room director and pep band coach have asked to use this process so they can track attendance during their activities outside the school day.

Pilot Positive Attendance Project at Nicolet High School Milw (WI)

• Starting in fall of 2012 John Reiels the Director of Technology at Nicolet has run several 2 week pilots offering an Academic Resource Period (ARP) where all 1100 students can sign up and seek help from their instructors.

• Nicolet wanted to use barcoded student ID badges (barcode = Skywards other id number) to identify who they are to the teacher laptop. Nicolet ARP solution has been so successful that they are planning to implement this every school day in the Fall 2013-2014 school year.

Pilot Positive Attendance Project at Nicolet High School Milw (WI)

Introducing SimpleTime® from STAi®

Giving Skyward customers the ability to identify WHO, WHEN & WHERE students are in their School or on their Campus.

Introducing SimpleTime® from STAi®

Skyward Applications tracked by Positive Attendance

Academic Resource PeriodsStudy HallsClassroom AttendanceBuilding Attendance

”Positive Attendance anywhere in your school or on your Campus”

THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!

Please stop by STAi® booth while at iCon for more details