Teach a Teacher Troubleshooting Project

Troubleshooting Project (Timeline & Description)

Over the course of a few weeks, I had the pleasure of working with Mrs. Shiels to find an app that she could try to use for attendance for the Make a Wish Club. At this moment, for club attendance, students use the remind app to notify her that they were, in fact, present for the event. However, what she found tedious was the fact that she had to insert all of the student's names into a google spreadsheet with all of their hours. But, she did not want to create a shareable spreadsheet because she feared that students would fudge their or their friends hours of volunteering (wanting to ensure integrity).

The first few weeks that I "met" with my teacher was through email. We talked about what the goal of this project was and what type of app needed to be found. There were many details (real-time attendance put straight into a spreadsheet) given however, we both knew that what we were looking for probably didn't exist. And that was true, it didn't. I searched through every phone and laptop app that dealt with attendance and nothing but business related attendance apps came up (but they were all too complicated to use).

What I found and recommended to her, was an attendance app for teachers that has all their students names in the "class" list and in turn tracks their attendance, even giving a percentage of total attendance. However, the more that we both looked into this solution we realized that it wasn't a solution as it was most useful for a classroom with about 30 kids, not a club with almost 200 members. And at the same time, Mrs. Shiels told me that because this problem most likely had no solution, and relieved me of my job.

Nonetheless, here are a few details about the app, Kinvolved from the app website itself,

"KiNVO provides a single interface for managing attendance data and delivers push notifications about attendance and communications activity."

"KiNVO reports analyze attendance real-time data to help educators identify at-risk students and plan proactive intervention"

In order to use the app, all the teacher has to do is download the app and then insert (or have students 

insert) all student phone information and such. The class time could be then used as "event" time and 

attendance will show up based on how often the student was at the event. In all, it is pretty easy to use.

The main goal of this app is to help prevent chronic absenteeism which was the main problem.

The main goal of the app we were looking for was to make attendance easier for teachers. No app was 

available that dealt with such goals which was the main problem.