By Gerald Haigh Much of the paperwork that teachers have to do is inevitable. If the Government makes schools more accountable and wants to drive up standards, then there has to be a measurement of classroom performance with the consequent number crunching. Technology's role is to make it all as easy as possible. As always, the challenge is to get the figures and grades from the classroom into the computer with the least possible need for copying them or changing them into a different form.
Similar problems arise with computerised attendance registration.
The data handling can only happen when the facts and figures have been moved from the teacher's desk to the computer. One solution is to enable the teacher to call up the register by radio from the school's central computer to a hand-held device in the classroom. The teacher marks this register on the hand-held and returns it by radio to the office. The change of name reflects the realisation, by Bromcom and its customers, that once the school has a radio link and the computing power, the system can be used for a variety of tasks. A number of schools are using this approach.