Soon, Karnataka Government schools will monitor real time attendance of students using tablets

State government school teachers will soon have to feed in attendance details in electronic tablets, monitored by senior authorities of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. It is expected to be implemented by the end of August. Once done, Karnataka will be the only state to monitor the real-time attendance of government schools. In Karnataka, there are 48,188 government schools, including 4,696 high schools. They have chosen 10,000 schools where the number of admissions is more than 200 to start with.

"Tablets will be given to each school, which will be used by the Principal. A separate login will be given to each school, and teachers will have to feed in students’ real time attendance everyday. They have to feed in the number of absentees, class-wise. They also have to feed in the teachers’ attendance. Apart from this, they have to feed in other data like the academic records of each student,'' a senior SSA official told The New Indian Express.

At present, the SSA has floated a tender for the tablets, expected to be delivered by August end. "One can monitor the attendance even from the head office. If a teacher or student is absent for long, it can be tracked and looked into,'' said an official. Right now, in many of the schools, teachers have to go to cyber centres to feed in these details once a week. Tablets will make this process easier.

Later, the tablets will be given to a Cluster Resource Person (CRP), who will handle the attendance records of 12-16 with lesser strengths. He or she shall visit two to three schools a day and feed in the entire week’s attendance in the tablet.

Later, they plan to include an option where teachers can raise issues related to school infrastructure, schemes or any other issue. It will be directed to the officials concerned for resolution. "Using tablets, teachers, in future, can use these as a window to raise complaints related to other issues,'' said an official.