Attendance/Scheduling Software

[s5511]

Our team is looking for an app/software that can track the attendance of our team members and allow easy,quick communication between team members. We are currently using Google Calendar and SMS, but its not working well. What do you guys suggest?

[sanddrag]

I use Remind for mass texting and it seems to work well.

[ASD20]

For sign ups for attending events, we usually use google sheets or occasionally google forms.

[rdgalgano]

We have been using Gmail and Google docs to manage our team.

But today, I just found out about TeamSnap from one of my kid's sports team. It looks pretty good.

Does anyone have experience with this TeamSnap? They have a free plan for less than 30 members, and for unlimited members it is $129.99 a year. We have a large team, and for that price it might be worth it if it makes things easier.

[Sperkowsky]

We developed a check in app this year that ultimately failed. So.... No help there.

For quick communication Slack works the biggest thing is making sure everyone has the app on their phone with notifications on in some degree.

[Tyler Olds]

We have used timeclockfree.com for our software. It's free and albeit a bit clunky it allows you to manually extract data pretty easily. They also have a mobile app for clock-in/out. On Wave we have a dedicated old classmate that he use for students to clock-in/out and and their logins restricted to only work on that computer. For mentors who track their time for volunteer hours there is a time card function so they can just input what they volunteered.

[Brian Maher]

For attendance, on 2791, we use a Google form for meeting sign-in/out and from there we export the file to Excel and use a pivot table to get all the students' hours totals. It's a simple system, but all we're really looking for is making sure students meet the build season hour requirement to travel with us.

On 1257 (and increasingly on 2791), we use Slack for communication and file sharing. It's a fantastic resource, allowing for chat channels for each subteam or project, private messages, and easy announcements to the whole team. Plus, they have nice mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone

[euhlmann]

On 2877 we have a Raspberry Pi with a keypad, screen, and NFC tag reader that we use for attendance tracking with Google Apps Script and Google Calendar.

[Lili_1868]

On our team, we have a scanner system. So whenever we come into the lab we scan in and when we leave we scan out. This was a really easy way to accurately keep track of hours during build season.

[protoserge]

MOE uses TeamSnap. As far as I can tell it works well. I have started a slack channel for the team to improve communication and limit excessive emails.

[Jon Stratis]

We just use Google sheets - a simple spreadsheet with all the students and all our meetings dates on it. For convenience, we have it printed out per subteam and posted near where the subteam meets - the mentors then can fill it out at the end of each meeting (more or less), and copy it into the spreadsheet once a week or so.

For us, we use it to help determine who gets to travel (50% attendance required) and who gets to letter (80% attendance required, in addition to other items). We play a little loose with those numbers, too... We've often made sufficient argument to give someone a letter when they were a couple points short, depending on the circumstances. One year, for example, there was a choir trip that several students attended during week 0, which caused them to miss out on about 2 normal weeks worth of the build season. It's less about meeting the specific number than it is contributing to the team... but to contribute you have to be at the meetings, and providing the students with those numbers helps to set the expectation for their level of contribution better than a vague statement trying to define how "contribution" is actually measured.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by s5511

We are currently using Google Calendar and SMS, but its not working well. What do you guys suggest?

You might get more targeted responses if you would explain what's not working well.

[bcampbell]

For communication our team uses Slack. It is a great resource for communication with the entire team and smaller groups such as each sub team which each have their own channel. In addition Slack has integration with google calendar which automatically posts new events that are added to the team calendar like lab hours and competitions. Slack even sends out a reminder about events in the google calendar. Slack has a ton of other sites that it integrates with such as github.

We also used it with parents at competitions as it has push notifications so it made making announcements at competitions when everyone is spread out easier.

We still maintain a group email with parents and students but primarily communicate through slack now.

We have setup our own checkin system in the lab. We have a checkin computer and each student is given an ID code when they register with our team. The checkin computer is a raspberry pi that is connected to an old monitor. Students login and logout every day on the computer by entering the ID code. The ID codes also bring up a picture of the students so it gives us a quick visual of who is in lab. The computer syncs with a server so we can look up hours from any computer. If a student forgets to log out that day they lose their hours. If you want more information about it let me know and I can ask the mentor who set it up

[tr6scott]

We still use this.

https://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2490

[bcampbell]

Originally Posted by tr6scott

We still use this.

https://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2490

Thanks Scott, I couldnt remember what the thread was called. We use an updated version of this now but the core is still the same