Thesis 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.

Thesis Overview

 Introduction

1.1Background

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.

Automation is the utilization of technology to replace human with a machine that can perform more quickly and more continuously [2]. By automating SMS documents that took up many large storage rooms can be stored on few disks. Transcript images can be annotated. It reduces the time to retrieve old transcripts from hours to seconds. However, the school system in the government schools of Addis Ababa is not automated and the record officers generate transcripts and reports manually and the school administrators use their experienced knowledge of miss and hit approaches to prepare timetables.

1.2Statement 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.

Teachers may want to associate a student with his parent or emergency persons for disciplinary measures which need searching of the students record in the record office. It has been difficult to search a record from thousands of such records and observed that students can take any person claiming that he/she is their parent or emergency person which creates problem in control of students.

Due to the inefficiency of the current manual system, the need arises to automate SMS in order to efficiently handle students’ attendance, to produce transcript, report cards and the various reports satisfying users and customers and to produce timetable which can schedule courses for teachers and classes of students.

1.3Objective

The general and specific objectives of the project are described below:

1.3.1General Objective

The general objective of the project is to automate the SMS.

1.3.2Specific Objectives

In order to attain the general objective, the following list of specific objectives is set:

To develop an offline registration system,

To facilitate attendance record keeping,

To facilitate various report generation,

To allow teachers, parents, school community and Education bureau officials to view reports on students,

To produce a timetable

1.4Organization 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