School attendance, absence and your child

Nowadays we can see that school absence rate among students is going to increase from year to year. Why going to school regularly is important for our child in future? The answer is to make sure our children not fall behind with their work and can do well in exams. Once our child is registered at a school, we are legally responsible for making sure that they attend regularly. If our child fails to do so, our risk is getting a penalty notice or being prosecuted.

There are many ways to preventing our child from missing school, what you can do as parents? We must:

• Making sure our child understand the importance of good attendance and punctuality

• Taking an interest in their education and always about school work and encourage them to get involved in school activities

• Discussing any problems they may have at school and inform their teacher or head teacher about anything serious problems

• Not letting them take time off school for minor ailments

• Arranging appointments and outing after school hours, at weekend or during school holidays

Support on school attendance introduced by government

m-Attendance is the first applications in Malaysia to detect the presence of students and to help reduce truancy rates through short messaging system (SMS) and e-mail. Secondary School (SMK) Kijal, Kemaman is first school in the country to use the m-Attendance pilot project. Total 41 pieces donated by Apple iPad Malaysia to SMK Kijal. The application system is using the iPad tablet computer platform that can manage the attendance of students in a fast, efficient and more systematic. The system developed by the Mobile Biz Network Sdn Bhd in collaboration with state government.

Among the benefits of m-Attendance

• Through this system, parents will receive information through SMS and e-mail on a daily basis if their children did not come to school. Parents will find out quickly if their child does not go to school. If they have a specific reason on the matter, they can inform immediately to the school. M-Attendance also helps to facilitate parents to offer suggestion, views and complaints to the school via SMS.

• m-Attendance is able to helping to publicize the activities and school programs such as school sport days, a reminder date of the examination, filing fees arrears, the meeting of the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) more quickly, easily and cost effective. As such, it will improve image and credibility of the school.

• m-Attendance has additional features such as the Homework Alert, Student Profile, Academic Report, Disciplinary Report and Digital Textbook.

• m-Attendance also be able to facilitate and ease the burden of classroom teachers in managing student attendance data.

This project will be monitored over the next three months and if it would benefit it will be extended to other schools over the country.

I strongly believed that  m-Attendance can reduce burden of teacher like me as it can made my daily official work become efficient and effective.

Video on m-Attendance

Source:

http://www.direct.gov.uk
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