Managing student attendance and keeping data clean can be complicated. Consolidated High School District 230 in Orland Park, Illinois utilizes School Technology’s SchoolTRAK web app with the Positive Attendance add-on for Skyward Qmlativ to streamline attendance processes. We spoke with District 230’s Director of Technology, Seth Wilkerson, to learn more about the ways SchoolTRAK has improved their attendance tracking experience.
District 230’s Windows computer with barcode scanner SchoolTRAK kiosk setup
“In Skyward Qmlativ, attendance is by course, a student needs to be rostered under a specific teacher for the attendance to be taken.” said Seth. This complicated tracking attendance for their resource hour for students. During that period, a student can choose between multiple locations to get further assistance with a specific course. Instead of only seeing where a student is rostered, the district wanted to be able to see where the student chose to go.
District 230’s PPK Device for SchoolTRAK
SchoolTRAK allows schools to create kiosks for students to check in or out on. These kiosks are customizable for many attendance taking scenarios. Each kiosk is tied to a room code, when a student uses a kiosk, it assigns a designated attendance code to the student with a time-stamp. Kiosks can be set to always assign a single designated attendance code or it can follow period rules that change the attendance code depending on how late into the current period a student checks in.
SchoolTRAK kiosks can be set up on a device that runs a web browser or with various types of hardware depending on what is best for the location. “We use a variety of kiosk types across the district. We have a few PPK devices (scanners that connect directly to the network – no computer needed), basic windows devices that we put in kiosk mode with a barcode scanner, and some staff use their laptops to scan students in,” Seth said. “We have around 40 kiosks in use and more if you include the staff that use their computers.”
Student Attendance Calendar View
All of the student kiosk entries are viewable within SchoolTRAK. “There are two different ways to visualize a student’s attendance: with a list view or calendar view. The calendar view gives a clear overview of the student’s attendance habits,” explained Seth. Each entry shows the location, time stamp, and attendance type. The primary attendance record for the period is synced into Skyward and shows that it was added by SchoolTRAK as well. This makes it easy to differentiate what was manually added by district staff and what is from SchoolTRAK. “SchoolTRAK syncs with Skyward at the frequency you set. We have it set to every 3 minutes. It’s pretty much real-time and it also pulls attendance from Skyward, so SchoolTRAK is a one-stop shop for attendance data.”
Student Attendance List View
On top of being able to clearly view attendance data by student, SchoolTRAK also shows an overview of attendance data district wide on the administrator homepage. Seth noted, “All of our administrators have access to the backend of SchoolTRAK to see the dashboard and reports. The visualization of the homepage dashboard is nice to get a quick snapshot of what is going on. For example, we didn’t have school on election day and we were able to easily see that there was a spike in absences the Monday before.”
Administrator Homepage Dashboard
The reporting function is a particularly favorite feature for District 230. “The reporting is very user friendly. Our favorite report we specifically requested and School Tech was receptive. Two weeks later the report was added,” exclaimed Seth. “We download the reports to see attendance data and track down specific students. It helps the deans tremendously and allows them to easily navigate and figure out where students were.”
Want to discover how your district can improve attendance data with SchoolTRAK? Reach out to us at sales@k12sta.com.
