Launching Classroom for iOS

Classroom is a simple utility app that will help you take attendance and remember students’ names.

When you first launch the app, you’ll see this.

An empty view of classes with no classes yet. You have two ways to input your students: the hard way or the easy way.

Let’s start with the hard way first. The hard way is to manually input all of the data. Tapping on “Edit” will allow you to “Add Class.” Tapping on “Add Class” will let you tap in the name of the class, as shown below.

When you have a class, then you can add students manually as well. Tap on the “Done” to finish editing the classes. Then tap on “My First Class” to view the students (none at the moment) in your class.

You’ll notice the “Edit” button at the top right. Tapping this will expose the “Add Group” and “Add Student” buttons.

“Add Group” works like adding a class. All you need is a name. The students will be organized in groups. If you don’t need this feature, then just put them all in one group with a name like “Main Group.” I do a lot of group work with my students so I find this feature helpful.

Once you have a group, you can tap the “Add Student” button.

“Nickname” might not be the best label for this field but I was looking for a common or simple name for my student. Since I’m teaching in China, this is usually the student’s English name.

“Fullname” is meant for the student’s full name. “Pronunciation” is used for cues on how to say the student’s Fullname. As I’m teaching in China, I use this field for the pinyin for his or her Chinese name.

Using this view, you can take a photo of the student and assign the student to a group.

Repeat for each class and for each student.

Now for the easy way.

Using your favorite text editor (Apple’s TextEdit will work), create a text file. The name of the file is important. Give the file the name of your class with the extension “.txt”, for example, “English 20.txt”. The name of the class in the Classroom app will be “English 20”.

The text file is a tab-delimited text file. In the text file, each line represents a student. For each student, four values are required: Fullname, Nickname, Group, and Pronunciation. Thus the text file will look something like this:

张玲玲   Carey      Skyfall    Zhāng Línglíng
谢慧杰   Susan      Freedom    Xiè Huìjié
齐原     Jessica    Spring     Qí Yuán
杨阳     Carina     Rainbow    Yáng Yáng

When your text files (one file for each class) are ready, you will copy them to your iOS device using iTunes File Sharing. Next time you launch Classroom, the text files will be processed. If Classroom is already launched, you will have to quit the app first.

 

The text files don’t allow you to include photos, just the textual information. But the photos are easy to take later.

Now that we have students in classes, how do we use the app?

At the start of the class, tap on the appropriate class in the “Classes” view. That will show you all the students in that class. Below is a freshly created class with values loaded from a text file.

If you want to remove a group, you’ll need to first move the students out of the group. Then, by double tapping on the section title, you’ll have a chance to delete the group. If the group is not empty, you’ll have a chance to change its name.

 

At the bottom of the screen, you will see the “New Session” and the “Open Session” buttons. The “New Session” button is enabled but the “Open Session” button is not. Tap on “New Session”.

This will create a new class session marked with the current date and time. Each student is organized by group. For each student, the photo, nickname, and full name are shown. The bar under the student’s name represents their performance. The number to the right of their name is how many times the student has been called on during this class session. The A, L, and P represent attendance: Absent, Late, and Present.

At the bottom, you can see “Roll Call” and “Random Student”. “Roll Call” starts the roll call process. Each student’s photo, name, group is shown with some controls.

You can take a photo, mark the student’s attendance, or skip the student. When you are done the roll call, your class might look something like this:

When you call on a student, you tap on their name or photo to show the view to access their performance. Also tapping on “Random Student” will show the view for a random student picked from the students who have been called the least.

How you use the performance bar is up to you. Generally, I use it as a guide for participation. It’s better than having to try to remember if a student has made an effort.

Data that is kept somewhere where you can’t access it is like having no data at all. With Classroom, you can export your data as a cvs file. cvs files can be imported into almost any spreadsheet application.

 

If there is exportable data, the Classes view will have the “Export” button enabled. Tapping on the “Export” button will create a cvs file that you can access through iTunes File Sharing. The format of the cvs file is pretty clear. Simply open the file in Numbers or Excel to see its contents.

I hope that this app is useful for you. If you have comments or suggestions, please let me know.

Classroom is available from iTunes. It’s free… so don’t ignore the ads too much please. 🙂