MarkBook For Guidance teachers and Administrators

    MarkBook^®     section 12-2

MarkBook File Management for Guidance Teachers and Administrators
Set up a common data storage structure for all MarkBook users in a school to make life much easier for teachers, guidance counselors, and school administrators. How often does someone other than the subject teacher need access to current and meaningful student data? This suggested storage structure is one of several ways of providing instant (and paperless!) administrative access to every student's achievement and attendance data.

This Windows '95 image shows a "tree" structure for several teachers' MarkBook class folders. Note that all folders are on the same drive (likely a network drive - not shown in this image), each subject department has its own folder, each teacher has a sub-folder, and each teacher's classes are sub-sub-folders. Some of these are older classes. It doesn't matter that older folders are present - someone may wish to look at data from last term or last year. For obvious reasons, this storage location must be password protected from student view.
File Storage for Common Access

Ken's folder is "open" showing all of its contents on the right side of the screen in the Name column. To do this, click on the folder name to highlight it. Opening the folder highlights the folder name and changes the symbol in the square to the left of the Ken folder from a + sign to a - sign. Compare this to the three teacher folders in the Moderns department. To close Ken's folder again, click on the minus sign.

Organized in this way, every educator with authorized access to this drive and a copy of MarkBook on their computer can open and examine every teacher's MarkBook class folders. Of course, the user must know which teacher and which class to open in order to find a specific student's results. Since Ken's user preferences are included in the MKBK7PRG and MKBK7USR files inside his folder, anyone opening these classes will get all screens and printouts structured the way that he prefers.

Good decisions flow from good information. How frequently does an administrator need access to good data about individual students? If such data was immediately available from the school's network, would the administrator use it? Would it be handy to print out nearly-up-to-date subject reports within seconds of asking How is Johnny doing? YES!, according to administrators we know.

For a guidance teacher, instant access avoids the need to circulate paper forms to teachers asking the usual progress questions. And it avoids the inevitable time delays waiting for forms to come back. Furthermore, if access is available during a student &/or parent interview in the guidance teacher's office, the teacher can ask pointed questions and make concrete suggestions about improvement: "You said that you were all caught up in French! But according to my computer, you have six missing assignments. Write the names of those down now. When will you have those completed? And you've missed eight classes but seven of those were on Fridays. I see that you've missed a lot of Fridays. What's happening on Friday?"

A guidance teacher can also answer the "what if" questions when students are in trouble academically. Suppose a student with numerous "incompletes" was being advised to hand in these delinquent items. For encouragement, the guidance teacher could pretend that the items had been graded: "Suppose you got 60% on that missing book report, how much would your overall grade improve?. The guidance teacher could alter the mark in the student's MarkBook computer record to see the potential impact on the overall grade. Of course, in this circumstance, it should be clearly understood by all users of this system that the class folders stored on the common drive are NOT each teacher's primary data source! Instead, a copy has been placed on this common drive specifically for department heads, administrators, and guidance teachers to use as they need. Each teacher must maintain a primary data source and backups elsewhere. See section 3-2 for details on making diskette copies for class folder backup and transport. Each subject teacher should refresh their folders on the common drive periodically.

If a school elects to move to a common data storage system like this one, we recommend that the following items be discussed:

how often should teachers refresh their data in the common file?
what security measures will be in place to prevent unauthorized access?
what uses will be made of the data? The intent is to use these files for the examination and promotion of student growth. They are not for teacher assessment.
should the entire staff agree to a common reporting timetable e.g. sending home interim reports (as in section 9-6) once a month?
should these interim reports conform to a common presentation style e.g. all with the trend graph, average, parent signature section, the same font, etc?
if an error is discovered, what is the communication process that should be used to inform the teacher?

Each school's IT technician will have suggestions as to how to create a file structure enabling access by authorized persons while denying access to students.