Filling out on-line forms
Teachers are generally reluctant to complete oodles of on-line fields and forms.
My college still uses a pencil and paper based system to record student behaviour incidents. Increasingly, I think that the exercise of completing these forms has as much to do with venting teacher feelings as it has to do with reporting and recording information.
The whole area of on-line databases still holds a few surprises for me.
Several years ago, I helped build an on-line system to record student behaviour issues. An Assistant Principal helped me by designing a set of on-line forms that would record details onto a search-able, relational database. The net result was that he was the only one that ended up using the system whilst other staff preferred to continue scribbling notes on to bits of paper. I had a similar experience with the first computer maintenance job tracking system that designed several years ago when I decided it was time to move away from the exercise book kept in the file server rom. Whilst it was a relational pop-up, pull-down, tick box marvel, ... No body used it, despite my disappointed protestations and pointed directions.
After talking things through with the technicians, we ended up with a simple, flat database with only a smidgen of fields including autonumber / usercode / date / memo. I could still search, edit and produce some simple reports to list work or identify particular record entries. Despite a small JavaScript bug that wasn't Y2K compatible and easily fixed, this database has survived into the next millennium notching up over 7800 entries.
Oddly enough, an on-line PD database that I had built in a hurry to record staff training courses continues to be used with practically no intervention by me, happily generating reports for each staff for all the training courses that they have attended. It only has the fields autonumber / staffcode / year / datetext / memo and cost. I gave up trying to figure out a complex system of date and time fields to record the start, finish and duration of each course and cheated with a simple text field. In the end, nobody cared as much as I did and everybody is happily typing in the necessary details into the one field.
Staff didn't need complex layers of on-line intervention propped up with code spawning from my boundless enthusiasm. Upon reflection, I believe that the simplicity of these two on-line solutions shares share a feature common to the success of the common weblog. Perhaps all that was ever needed for an on-line tracking system to record student behaviour was the flavour of weblog with just a memo field for staff to vent their frustrations through the keyboard.
The Dalai Lama once said: 'simplicity is the key to happiness in the modern world'. He had the right idea all along.