The Mr W
My name is Dexter Williams and having been an ICT teacher in a large secondary school for several years I have come across a wide variety of challenges involving data. I believe that software should not be difficult to learn and use and certainly should not add extra time to the way teachers work. I hope to provide some useful suggestions of how data can be used to your advantage. The data could come from an internal MIS or simple manual entry.
This page holds the links to the development projects available for schools or individual teachers to use. Feel free to play around and see if they would help you in your teaching. If you have any suggestions for improvements or new ideas for data that you would like to access or store easily then drop me an email to this address: lookfordex@hotmail.com
Mailfinder (Version 3.0)
Mailfinder is the most widely used piece of software in UK schools. It simply allows staff to find the teachers of a student in seconds. This encourages communication but more importantly means that all your email messages are targetted at the correct audience. Schools are saving 100's of wasted hours in combined time when you think how many irrelevant emails you recieve in a day, and then consider that all staff have the same issue. All the data comes from your MIS and can be running in about 15 minutes from download, but visit the site and have a play with the demo to see how it works.
Achievement Tracker (Version 1.0)
Achievement Tracker is allows you to access simple interface in which you can assign your own criteria in terms of achievements and then create groups of students and teachers. It could be used by a single teacher, a department or whole school depending on your requirements. There is some sample data already loaded which you can play around with, but if you want your own area, just follow the registration link and I can allocate you some space. The idea has actually started me thinking about a similar project which might involve tracking assessments in a similarly simple way.
Class Timer
This is a simple timer project that could be expanded to include all manner of timers so drop me a line if you think of something. There are some nice sound effects you can have at the end and several trainee teachers have commented that the '8-sector' countdown clock is really handy to have in the background and tie it in with the lesson plan to pace it correctly.
Spelling Bee
The idea with this project was to allow teachers to upload their own spelling lists which the program will automatically detect. All the words are simply stored as a sound file which you can record with the built in Sound Recording software on your computer. If you would like to expand this project or use it as a resource please email me and I'll do my best to help out.