21-09-2012, 02:47 PM
SCHOOL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
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Abstract
This project work automates school management system. In the system two applications are developed, Windows based (thick client) and Web based (thin client).
The windows application takes most of the activities such as offline student registering, transcript and report card generation and producing the timetable. The web application facilitates attendance recording by the homeroom teachers, to view status of students by their parents and to view reports by kebele and kifle-ketema education bureau officials.
Our solution of the timetable is very simple. In the high school considered for the project there are ten subjects for both grade nine and grade ten. Loads are assigned to each subject teacher and a code is given for each teacher-subject combination. A simple search technique has been used during allocation of each teacher-subject code to a time slot. A database has been used to enforce constraints and to store data.
The prototype has been tested with data from Kokebe Tsebah Secondary School. It has been observed that the system successfully registers students, facilitates attendance recording by the home room teachers and generates various reports such as report card, transcript and a feasible timetable satisfying the constraints (requirements). It has also been shown that the system facilitates to view the status of students by their parents using the Internet or Intranet of the school.
Introduction
Background
Education system forms the backbone of every nation. And hence it is important to provide a strong educational foundation to the young generation to ensure the development of open-minded global citizens securing the future for everyone. Advanced technology available today can play a crucial role in streamlining education-related processes to promote solidarity among students, teachers, parents and the school staff.
Education is central to development. It is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing poverty and inequality and lays a foundation for sustained economic growth. With this aim currently our government has given special emphasis to the educational sector and school improvement activities such as continuous professional development for teachers, training and upgrading teachers and capacitating schools with manpower and materials are among the major actions which have been taken in both primary and secondary schools. In order to facilitate and simplify these actions one of the major tool is to have automated school management system.
School Management System(SMS) consists of tasks such as registering students, attendance record keeping to control absentees, producing report cards, producing official transcript, preparing timetable and producing different reports for teachers, parents, officials from kebele or kefle ketema education bureaus and other stakeholders.
Statement of the Problem
To help promote students achievement and success, schools must have access to complete, accurate, and timely information about students. One of the benefits of automated SMS is that the student record system will simplify retrieval of required information and is a great instrument for school improvement by taking measures from the information acquired. Despite the use of automated SMS, the government schools in Addis Ababa are using paper based documentation system for performing various tasks and the school administrators apply their knowledge of hit and miss approach in scheduling classes and courses (preparing the timetable) which wastes manpower and much time unnecessarily that does not utilize the current technology.
Transcripts of students are prepared manually by the record officer and teachers. Report cards are produced by the home-room teachers. Attendance of students is recorded by the home-room teachers. In order to control absentees and know the number of days that a student has been absent from the school during the school days the attendance officer has to collect the attendance slips from the corresponding homeroom teachers and compile it which is also a time taking process. In addition to that retrieving records of students who have graduated couple of years ago has been a difficult task and the manual system also has difficulty of producing different reports which are required by the stakeholders such as teachers, administrators or officials from kebele and kifle-ketema.
Organization of the Document
This report document contains seven chapters including this chapter. Chapter two defines and describes concepts with regard to SMS, aiming to give a general view to the reader of the document about tasks or activities which need automation in the school environment. Chapter three presents review of research works on SMS. In chapters four and five, we presented the analysis and design of the developed system respectively. In the remaining chapters, prototype development and conclusion and recommendations are briefly explained.
Observed Products
In the year 2003 City Government of Addis Ababa Education Bureau (CGAAEB) was very much interested to have automated school management system to get uniform and quick access to the students’ data for administrative purpose on promoting the students’ achievement and related issues. The bureau has selected Wundrad Preparatory School for pilot test. At the time the school principals together with officials from CGAAEB signed a contractual agreement with some software developer company. The developers installed their first version of the product which can register a student offline and generate official transcript with some level of difficulty. As the system is not fully automated, it does not support management of attendance, does not support generating report cards and other important functions such as generating school timetable and a web based report for parents. Due to the lack of follow up by the government officials at CGAAEB, the company was unable to complete the project. The school currently is unable to use the partially developed system because of lack of trained person and lack of hardware and software maintenance.
Another product that is in use is transcript generator system. The transcript generator system at Menelik II Preparatory School generates official transcript of students. In order to generate transcript the record officer enters the student information along with the grade marks for the grades completed per year and per semester. Then the system generates the required official transcript. Currently the school is using the system to generate official transcript even though the data entry format has unnecessarily many fields which are not applicable for the record office but can be used for continuous assessment by the course teacher.
Manual Timetabling
Manual timetables are prepared by dedicated teachers. In manual timetabling, it is common to proceed in an iterative fashion where each iteration selects and schedules a lesson [3]. Scheduling a lesson requires to choose a classroom (fixed for each section of students) and a time slot such that the commitment to the choice will not violate any constraint.
In school timetabling, we are required to schedule a given set of meetings such that the resulting timetables are feasible and acceptable to all people involved. Humans are able to prepare the timetable using some hit/miss approach. So it is possible to automate the timetable based on a simulation of the human way of solving the problem. Such techniques, that we call direct heuristics, were based on a successive augmentation. That is, a partial timetable is extended, lecture by lecture, until all lectures have been scheduled. The underlying idea of all approaches is to schedule the most constrained lecture first.
Non Functional Requirements
Security requirements are important factors in this system as classified data will be stored in the database. User validation will be done during login to insure that the user is valid and that the user only has access to his or her permission data. General users will only have access through the user interface.
The system will have consistent interface formats and button sets for all forms in the application, will have a form based interface for all data entry and viewing formats, and will generate reports that are formatted in a table and that should look like the existing manual report formats for user friendliness.
The system will be easily maintained by the developer or other authorized trained person and it shall respond as fast as possible in generating report and producing the timetable.