How eTechSchool made life easier at schools in 2014-15

eTechSchool : Case Stories (2014-2015) 
Blog by Neha Deshmukh (Product Head, eTechSchool)

Jnana Prabodhini Prashala:

1. Out of marks less than 100 for board upload
1. This year it came to their notice that the board has restricted the entry of out of marks of total exams conducted for a subject for formative/summative to less than 100.
2. The sum of out of marks of total exams conducted for many subjects under a particular exam type (FA1,FA2 etc.) exceeded 100.
3. It wouldn’t be fair deleting some exams as that would be unfair to students who had scored more in those exams.
4. So the only option was to convert it to a different out of marks say convert out of 20 to out of 5 etc. Great!! But will the teachers have to do it manually for every child and make entries again????
5. Not at all!!! eTechschool’s provision to convert the marks to whatever factor the user wants to came handy this time. Phew…. the teachers were relieved and so were we.
2. Internal and board marks different settings
1. The schools idea was to reveal average marks to parents in report cards whereas best marks to be uploaded on the board’s site. For instance if 3 exams are conducted in FA1 then parents will be shown average of them and for board upload best amongst them would be selected.
2. The thinking behind this was that the students should feel that he still needs to work harder to achieve best marks. If the schools reveals best marks to the parents.
3. Here, the tool for setting different rules for internal calculation and different rules for board uploads proved beneficial.
3. Inspection
1. All sorts of reports which were required for school’s inspection conducted by CBSE were pulled out from eTechSchool.

Global Indian International School (GIIS Chinchwad):

1. OTBA Issue
1. There was a confusion amongst the teachers and they entered SA2 marks on 90 including 10 marks OTBA (Open text book assessment) and again entered OTBA on 10 separately as well.
2. Actually SA2 should have been entered on 80 and OTBA on 10.
3. What happened due to this was that instead of total being calculated on 90 it was getting calculated on 100 due to which there was a grade mismatch for few students.
4. The teachers could not delete OTBA or reduce SA2 on 80 as the board again requires them as, on 10 and on 90 respectively while uploading to their server. What could be done??
5. Simple, the flag for consider this exam in report card was turned off for OTBA

2. Report card for 11th admission for selected exams
1. This particular school is starting 11th standard from commencing year. For giving admission to inhouse students, they wanted to consider only Pen-paper tests which were under FA1 and FA3 along with SA1 marks.
2. They required percentage for all students for these selective exams
3. They selected the exams of their interest and pulled out an excel sheet from the system with marks in respective exams and percentage on basis of marks scored in them. Their requirement was fulfilled.

    3. Lesson Plans and Inspection

1. This school has been awarded for the methodologies they use to plan their lessons.
2. But all of this was being done in word documents which were maintained by respective teachers and were emailed to the academic head incharge of them for verification and approval.
3. So at the end of every month the admin had around 200 emails for lesson plans which flooded her mail box. So it was very difficult to keep track of pending lesson plans and giving out suggestions and approvals
4. Then they started using eTechschool to enter their lesson plans. The system pushed reminders for pending lesson plans to teachers as well as acad heads
5. The process of verification, approval and making suggestions has become very easy as all lesson plans are at one place.
6. Even if a teacher quits, a new teacher joins as a substitution, she has access to all previous lesson plans and can easily adapt to the teaching styles being used in the school.
7. ** There was an inspection declared in this school. They wanted to take prints of month wise, class wise and subject wise prints of all the lesson plans (that being an award winning area). There was a holiday on the day prior to the inspection. So teachers were unavailable. Only acad heads and admins were working. The situation demanded a functionality were on a single click all lesson plans fell in respective month/class and subject folders. eTechschool was successful in fulfilling this demand.

Gurukul (Saraswati Education Society):

1. Challengers and Notification Slips
1. This school maintains record of students with learning disabilities/ writing disabilities etc. under challengers. Earlier the councellor used to maintain the list and take care of it.
2. But again if a new teacher joins in, she has to know who all are the challengers in her class and give them special attention or assist them. Also while evaluating/ giving remarks a teacher should consider the fact that he/she is a challenger and grade/ comment accordingly.
3. This was incorporated in eTechschool. Now every teacher can view the disabilities if any for a particular child while evaluating him/ entering comments for him.
4. Notification slips saying your child’s performance needs attention, his/ her behaviour is affecting her performance/ she has made a commendable progress in term 2 are given out to parents of some children. Earlier the school used to give them manually.
5. Now they just assign the slips to respective children and the same are sent out along with the report cards in form of emails.
2. Awards
1. Awards for maximum attendance
2. Commendable progress from term I to term II
3. Such awards are given out. For this the teachers had to manually calculate attendance/ percentage progress and then give out awards.
4. Now that all entries are maintained in the system, the system pulls out the names of students eligible for these awards.
5. All the teacher needs to do is approve them.

3. Document Management
1. Maintaining Inward/ Outward documents was a headache for this school
2. There were multiple copies of a single letter on different PCs, all been named as final copy. The person incharge had no clue which template is to be used to send across.
3. eTechSchool assists them in maintaining all letters in one place grouped in a logical tree structure and maintains the record of every letter which is issued.
4. Now even if a new person has replaced the earlier person in charge of sending out the letters, he exactly knows where he will find the template for the letter.
4. Remarks Verification and approval
1. Remarks approval and verification was a long and hectic procedure for this school
2. The teachers used to write the remarks, the head would make changes, the teacher would correct them, the head would approve and then the teacher would write them into the report cards.
3. Now, the teachers use the existing comment pool, from where the comments are selected. She adds/ edits if required.
4. The head logs in and views all remarks entered for selected child. As many comments are pulled from comment pool, they are already pre-approved. If any editions are to be made the head does it  and saves it.
5. This is called process simplification.

5. Auditing experience
1. The other day late evening, I got a call from chief accountant of Gurukul. It took me by surprise as it was an unusual hour for a call from her.
2. She had called for conveying that, it was the first day of auditing for year 2014-2015 and the CA was astonished by the type of reports which were already being maintained by the school, generated by eTechschool for fees and payroll.
3. She had called to convey that eTechschool is a boon for us which saves us from all clerical work and we can use that time to do better things. Can you believe, she had called to just convey that. One of the best evenings for me.

Jnana Prabodhini, Solapur, Pre-Primary:

1. Different kind of evaluation methodology

1. Pre-primary schools have reports where a lot of remarks/ comments are written down. So a teacher has to write down lengthy reports on basis of daily observations for every child.
2. Now most of the remarks are like, he/she can recognize alphabets very well, he can recognize alphabets under guidance, he is unable to recognize the alphabets etc. So these are repetitive comments/ remarks which  the teacher writes down again and again.
3. What eTechshool does is, it maps these comments to specific grades. Say grade
4. A will say - he/she can recognize alphabets very well,

B - he can recognize alphabets under guidance and

C - he is unable to recognize the alphabets

     e.  What the teacher does is just selects the grades against every child and the system automatically generates the comments.

     f.  So much time gets saved…