MONTREAL — Two former Bialik High School staffers have created a new mobile app they feel promises to revolutionize the way school educators and administrators monitor students.
Now being piloted at Herzliah High School, the hope is that it will be used there full time come the start of the next school year at the end of August.
That would pave the way for other schools in Montreal and elsewhere to use it.
Called the TEAM Student Tracker, the application, with only a few clicks of an app “button” on a smartphone, tablet, desktop or laptop, allows school staff to share or obtain information about students on a real-time and up-to-the-minute basis. It’s also bilingual and exceedingly user-friendly.
Its creators say the app eliminates the need for school staffers to wade through student files in databases and the possibility that relevant information on a student in those files will linger there without being noticed.
“We really saw this as a perceived need,” said Brenda Fayerman, who was Bialik’s information technology director for 20 years.
Judy Stein, a Bialik science teacher and director of academics for three decades, agreed. “[The old system] was very inefficient,” she said. “Not every teacher filled out forms, and they couldn’t always get feedback. It became very hard to manage a large group of students and a large group of staff.”
Last September, after leaving Bialik, Fayerman and Stein realized that schools needed a program that would make student information – such as work habits and behaviour – “inputable” and retrievable by educators moment-to-moment, while exploiting the latest mobile technology.
Fayerman and Stein formed the company EdTech JSBF Inc. Then they approached the Centre local de development (CLD) de Québec, a provincial agency that advises wannabe entrepreneurs, and then CloudHorizon, a company that develops mobile applications, to create their app.
With only a few button taps, the app pages open to a series of drop-down menus that allow educators and administrators to either put in or take out information – both positive and negative – about a given student.
The main opening buttons are “observation,” “intervention” and “history,” which gives access to information about a given student, including anything from a student improving – or struggling – in class, to an incident in the hallway.
The “history” button, where entries are highlighted in green, red and blue respectively, indicate “good,” “bad” and “intervention.”
Stein and Fayerman stressed that one of the main purposes of their application is to enable a “team approach” to monitor and track students. There is no limit to the number of possible users.
Recently, Stein and Fayerman unveiled the app at a technology conference in Niagara Falls, Ont., to great interest. The next phase will be to market their app to schools everywhere. For more information, email [email protected], [email protected] or visit www.edtechjsbf.com.