Home > audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-learning > How to take roll in class using Sanako Study 1200

How to take roll in class using Sanako Study 1200

  1. Today:
    1. I had to work on getting my Sanako classroom layouts back up after a network cutover on the first day of the academic year.
    2. I could observe a teacher new to the Sanako lab taking roll on paper, reading out each student’s name and finding the student in the classroom . This is a known good way to learn to put a face to a students’ name. Once that is done (and maybe could be done also faster using student thumbnails in university computer systems like the LMS), one can save teaching time taking roll doing the following :
  2. At the beginning of each of your class meetings:
    1. You cannot start a sanako class before your students have logged in and their sanako student clients have started up – that is the first I always ask my students to do.
    2. In the initial Sanako tutor startup dialogue, open an empty class.
    3. Wait for the “corridor” to be fully populated, then select all.
    4. Have the sanako tutor populate the classroom layout.
    5. Choose menu file / save classroom layout as, and save in your tutor folder with the date as the filename.
    6. (Load your familiar class layout to actually begin your class – this will take little extra time, for Sanako tutor does not need to wait again for the Sanako student clients to start up).
  3. After the last day of classes:
    1. load each saved file into MS-Excel (as an XML table),
    2. first column will be class date, hide all columns in between that and your student login name,
    3. select and copy these 2 columns into an attendance spreadsheet (if you find a way to strip the xml wrapper, you can merge the files on the command line – after all, the classroom layout files are just plain text),
    4. in the attendance spreadsheet, calculate attendance
      1. either sort first by date, then by login name, and count attendance manually using the dates;
      2. or have Excel count for you with an array formula pasted into a third column that checks for and counts identical dates.
  4. Final thoughts: Your mileage may vary if you don’t teach all your classes in a Sanako lab – I used to and have come to appreciate an institutionally provided and maintained lab infrastructure which is stable – compared with complaints I have heard about having to rely on your students not forgetting their clickers if you want to use technology rather than class time for taking roll outside of a stable infrastructure.
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