= Premium Content

  • Monday, May 28, 2012

Previous

Next

Two More Uses for the Attendance iOS App

March 7, 2011, 11:00 am

By Ryan Cordell

classroom_pictureLast July, Jason wrote an extensive post about Attendance, an iOS app that helps teachers take attendance and more in their classes. After that post I downloaded and started using the app in my classes. Like Jason, I now rely on this app to keep track of who’s in class and who’s not, and to remind me to notify students who miss too many classes.

I’ve found two unexpected benefits from the app, though, that I thought would be worth highlighting here:

Learning student names. As Natalie wrote, “Learning your students’ names quickly is a crucial element in building rapport, creating community within a discussion-based course, and facilitating many classroom management tasks like grading participation or attendance.” Attendance allows you to add pictures of your students to their profiles. You can use the phone’s camera to take the pictures from the profile screen, or you can import them from your photo library. I’ve started adding my class rosters to Attendance before the first day of classes. Then, in the first class, I go through the roll, add any necessary notes to their profiles—such as nicknames, etc.—and snap a picture of each student. I explain why I’m doing it: “this will help me learn your names quickly.” Once I’ve added all my students’ pictures to Attendance, I can click the “Photos” button (Add/View–>Photos) to email all the photos, with the students’ names, to myself. Even better, I can start a slideshow of my students and their names (Random–>Cycle Through Students) within the app. This is how I now learn student names: first I flip through my students’ pictures with their names above, and as I get begin to remember their names I cover the names with my thumb and only flip through the pictures. Before the second class session I have my students’ names memorized.

Forming teams for groupwork. Jason mentioned this briefly in his post, but I’ve found the group organizing feature of Attendance invaluable these past two semesters. When you click the “Random” category within the app, you can then ask Attendance to organize your class into groups of anywhere between 2 and 30 students. This allows me to quickly and impartially put together teams for groupwork, and saves me organizational time. It also saves me any worry that I’m not constituting groups fairly. I use this feature in nearly every class.

If you’re a teacher with an iOS device, I strongly recommend that you try Attendance. Given its many features—those that Jason outlined and those I’ve mentioned here—it’s well worth its minimal price tag of $4.99.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Ed Schipul.]

This entry was posted in Software, Teaching and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

  • Print
  • Comment
  • magistrahf

    I’m using Attendance, and was wondering if there’s an easy way to get pictures from a website/link/dropbox file into it. I set up the classes at the start of the semester, but didn’t put in pictures then. I’d prefer not to do the transfer through the library, and it didn’t look like the CSV was an option. It’s a really nice app.

  • http://ltlatnd.wordpress.com Chris Clark

    I’m using Attendance this semester with a small class, including the convenient group selection option. I even went through the hassle of adding photos, and was glad I did. That having been said, the program has minimal functionality for the price.

    I appreciate the fact that David Reed probably wrote it in his proverbial garage. I don’t begrudge him the success, but why are there so few choices in this category of app? For five bucks I should get features like photo import and better reporting.

  • npboyer

    I love this app. However, when I took pictures this fall, one student complained to the Provost (without bothering to talk to me first). End result: I had to make photos optional. We don’t have photos on our online classlists, so I was looking forward to this as a replacement. I’ve given up.

  • ychumanities

    I started using this app in January and have found that I DO know my students names better than I have in any previous semester, and I have better attendance records than in previous classes as well. But I also have had some problems with the picture-taking aspect of the app. It took most of the first class period to get the pictures taken, and some students were somewhat freaked out by me taking those pictures. Because I didn’t want to invade their personal space TOO much, I ended up with pictures that were head-and-torso rather than focusing on the face, and that makes them pretty difficult for my marginal eyesight to distinguish when I’m taking attendance. Ideally my college would provide photos as part of the roster, but that’s not the case now, so I’m still working out how to best use the picture option in this app.

  • dave256

    You can import photos from Dropbox with the roster (see the “New CSV import options” video at gallery.me.com/dave256). Currently the only options for adding photos after you’ve added the roster is to use the camera (if the device has a camera) or select them from the Photo library. Perhaps a future version will have an option to select a photo from Dropbox.

    If you have specific requests for other reports, feel free to email them to me. I’ve still got a long list of feature requests that I haven’t gotten to and have been working on a grading app too (www.dave256apps.com/gradea) so I don’t know when I’ll get to all of them, but I typically spend about 5-10 hours a month working on Attendance in addition to about 3-6 hours a month answering support email.

    Yes, I wrote it in my “proverbial garage” as I teach full-time myself. I suspect the reason there aren’t any better apps (there are a couple competitors that have fewer features) is there’s not enough money to make it worth it for a company to develop. I’ve put about 6 months of full-time work into it over 26 months. For the first year, I made less than $10 an hour for all the time I put into it. It’s finally starting to be worth the effort as sales have continued at a reasonable pace, but it’s still too much of a niche market for a company to develop an app with more features. I end up with about $400 to $500 a month (after taxes) most months which is a nice supplement to my income, but not anywhere near close to justify a company investing time in an app and not enough for many individuals to consider it worth their time. As I’ve said before, I wrote it because I wanted to use it. If I weren’t using it myself, there’s no way I could justify the huge effort to write it and support it for the income it provides.

  • landrumkelly

    Unless one side or the other backs down–and that seems unlikely–this will surely wind up on the Supreme Court docket sooner or later. This could all be very interesting for the future of public sector unionization, to say the very least.

    Landrum Kelly

  • tdr75

    I agree with tookt (below) to an extent. My previous institution was in a state where collective bargaining is not banned, but it’s non-existent in the public sector. Often…VERY often in fact, the ability to deliver quality education was hampered not by the faculty, but by state legislators who thought they were education experts OR by an administration that seemed more concerned with maintaining their very high salaries and those of their friends in the administration. We were getting it from both barrels of the shotgun.

    Budget cuts came down the pipe and the university went through a long, laborious, and thorough “institutional priorities” process to identify those areas that were the most ripe to be cut. The administration completely ignored the results of the institutional priorities process and just made the cuts they saw fit. And just so you know, the IP committee was made up of staff, faculty, and administration employees. The cuts proposed included some entire academic departments as well as cuts on staff side…it was not a one-sided document in any way.

    Of course, the committee was told that the upper level administrative positions were off the table. And there were other expensive programs that they were told could not be touched as well (mostly pet projects of administrators). Overall what came out was quite balanced despite that. yet it was ignored.

  • Rezishka

    I don’t use e-text yet! Is this the wave of the future? Am I not running against the wind?

  • vandoesborgh

    What will probably happen is that the school will not collect the fee, instead the student will have to pay for an access code to the Pearson ebook. I’m sure the school put it in the fees so that student could apply financial aid to the fees. (Not that getting a loan for a temporary book is at all a good idea.)

  • cb_10

    The school is essentially acting as a vendor here for the textbook publisher. The simple solution would be to run all charges for textbook-related materials through the campus bookstore, which is how most schools seem to do it. The student however, is running up a blind alley here. The most they can hope for is to pressure the institution into not requiring the book, but if this is the primary text for the class, then what?

    Textbook and ancillary costs are a big burdent these days and the costs don’t seem in proportion with inflation over the last few decades. The solution is for schools and departments to start bargaining harder. Make textbook cost a part of the deals. Challenge the publishers to make some deals, and not just the multiple packaging offerings they promote. The assumption that there is only the flat publisher fee is hardly one that is in tune with market economics.

    On the flip side, publishers are investing in providing richer content, including online materials, and this isn’t cheap to produce, especially those who create video and audio resources (or license them, also expensive). Students who expect a lot of high quality content should recognize there is a cost that comes with that content.

  • chemistry_guy

    Pearson (and its tinier but equally rapacious brethren, McGraw-Hill and Cengage) are what is left over from 40 odd small publishing houses that started out doing good work publishing college texts for courses ranging from freshman (with hundreds or even thousands of students enrolled at many campuses) to senior and even graduate courses with only a few students wnrolled in any given semester (if the course even ran at all) at prices that seemed outrageous at the time but now look positively quaint by comparison. 

    These enormous Corporations now publish *only* for the largest introductory and especially remedial courses, and they use technology for a variety of purposes, one of which is to hide price increases.  To quote the Gollum, they are “tricksy.”

    People were howling about the price of textbooks, and Pearson managed to increase its profits nonetheless by hiding some revenue in the technology (which expires, and can’t be resold, like a book, to live another day and compete against new books).  This should have been a classic case of disruption from the internet disintermediating an unnecessary middle man, but it wasn’t.  So why not?

    In this case, Pearson finance people calculated what they needed in dollars per student to increase revenues and profits by X percent to return to shareholders (and earn a fat bonus) and then distributed the costs between print and technolgy materials, so they have you one way or the other:  a) if you buy a brand new text for $190 (rising at twice the rate of inflation over the past two decades), they have you already, b) if you manage to get a used book for much less, you have to pay $78 to have your homework computer graded instead of read by a human being (and get a superfluous e-text) on MyMathLab.

    Complicit and partially guilty are the admirable but very busy and relatively poorly-paid remedial math instructors (most are adjunct and look upon a free sandwhich the way a professor regards a Mercedes), who regularly accept invitations to sponsored symposia in places like Key West (where there is oh-by-the-way-a-fishing-trip-too), dinners, luncheons, and attend departmental meetings where MyMathLab is demonstrated for them by neatly coiffed, sartorially splendid young men and women fresh from college.  They get addicted to the technology, and chummy with their dealer (Pearson) because they know how to use it, and it saves them time at the students’ expense.

    And all of these fees add up for students trying to get an Associates Degree at Foothill to the benefit of Pearson Corporation more than anyone else.

    I could gripe all day, but here is a suggested solution:  teachers, grow a spine and tell Pearson you are not going to adopt MyMathLab or any Pearson book until they show you all of the revenues and genuinely reduce costs for students once and for all.  And if Pearson doesn’t make good, for God’s sake adopt one of the hundreds of mushrooming free books and tell the students MyMathLab didn’t save the world so you aren’t going to have time to grade their homework but if they don’t do it an F is decidedly in their futures.

    And stick to that until Pearson comes into line or a disruptive, cheap innovation comes along (all you have to do is look).

  • mikejunior14

    These fees are almost a third of what it would cost for just the textbook alone in print. Affordability is the issue at hand and this school should be applauded, not sued. This is the only viable way to get students the very best materials at reasonable prices – course material fees are the wave of the future. I’m not arguing that the student does or doesn’t have a case. if the student does, then change the law because it is is standing in the way of consistent and high quality education. Not the first time that California law has done that though.

  • mikejunior14

    Free?  Recall as far back as you can go…what are the free things you have that were worth anything?

  • chemistry_guy

    Sorry, Mikejunior14.  I got going for a bit there.  I should have said “almost one third of the cost of a traditional print textbook.”  Flatworld?  MIT Open? Perhaps free was an overstatement…but there is no need for any student to spend $190 for a set of math problems that can be written by many graduate students.  Why don’t you react to the rest of my post?

  • vivid

    Thanks for the insight into the economics and the work that went into making this app. I rhave the app to be very useful, and a great brgain.

  • David Green

    not sure about this – I’m currently looking at a Pearson e-book for next semester, and my understanding is students can buy and retain the rights individually – I haven’t seen anything about expiry (tho’ I’ll seek to find out).

    This sounds like the college has negotiated a bulk order deal for students in order to get staff materials included, and the college risks an upfront cost they have to seek to recover from the students.

    In this age of students resisting buying textbooks (not enough left over after their $60 a month mobile phone bill) our college didn’t want to risk being out of pocket for unrecovered e-book costs.  So we’re thinking to leave it to the students to buy their own e-books – the downside is we won’t get the staff resources provided.

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.

  • The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W.
  • Washington, D.C. 20037