Mobile app 1.4.0: weekly marks, the school timetable, and printable exam documents

Version 1.4.0 is out on Google Play. Two things a school could only do at a desk have come to the phone: the week it teaches, and the marks it records each week. Both shipped on the web over the past fortnight and neither had a mobile surface at all.

The iPhone and iPad app is coming soon.

A week of marks, recorded and published

Weekly grades are a mark per pupil, per subject, per academic week, published to families a week at a time and optionally carried onto the term report card. The whole lifecycle now works from a phone: record the week's marks, publish it, lock it when it is final.

Publishing is the whole school at once, and only that. Publishing class by class is a review of which pupil is missing from which subject, and that reads as a table, which this app deliberately does not do. What a head teacher wants on a Friday evening is the one decision. Every class shows its marks-in figure, the subjects nobody has marked, and a tick. A class with nothing marked is listed but unticked, so the count on the button is the number that will actually go out, and the school can still see that 3B has nothing marked. The confirmation names the part-marked classes before anything is sent.

Locking confirms, and unlocking does not. That asymmetry belongs to the act itself. A lock stops the teacher who has just spotted a wrong mark, and the person taking it should know that before the tap. An unlock only hands that back.

A blank is not a zero. No mark means no row, so it sits outside every average, while a recorded 0 counts. A week that has not begun yet says so in its own words rather than borrowing the locked week's sentence: one resolves itself on Monday, and the other needs an administrator.

Families read the term as a mark book, subjects down and weeks across, above the per-week cards. "How is she doing in Maths" is the question that page gets opened with, and six stacked tables cannot answer it.

The school's timetable, on the phone

The app now reads the school's published week from the timetable engine. It shows one day, opening on today, with the period running now and the one after it, both on the day view and on the dashboard.

There is no builder and no month grid. A week laid out as a grid on a phone is a week nobody can read, and a second builder writing rows the portals do not read is how a school loses a Tuesday.

The week prints. A Week button beside the day heading hands the school's landscape sheet to the phone's own share sheet, so saving to files, printing and emailing all come free. Each person gets their own week and nothing else: a pupil's class, a parent's chosen child, a teacher's consolidated one, an administrator's chosen class.

A teacher can also be pushed their next lesson, which opens their own day rather than the single period it names. The point of being told about the next lesson is that what comes after it is the next question.

Exam documents, in the hand that needs them

A class's papers, an invigilator's list, a room's day and the attendance roster a paper is registered on could all be printed from the web and from nothing on the phone. That was the wrong way round: an invigilator wants their roster on the way in, not at a desk.

One action on the exam screen, a choice of which document and then of which class, invigilator, room or paper. The options are built from the papers already on screen, so nothing offered leads nowhere: a school with no rooms named is never offered a room's day, and a series with one class skips a question that has one answer. My invigilation duties is offered to every member of staff; the three school-wide sheets need the exam reports permission.

A paper sat on the online testing module now carries an Online tag where the venue would go.

A pupil's first password

A pupil's account is created with their admission number as its password, and that number is on every class list. The server has always insisted on a change before anything else can be done, so a pupil who signed in and went anywhere else met a screen of failures with nothing saying why. The app now takes them straight to the change, offering a sign-out rather than a skip, for a shared computer.

Their own profile gains the change-password card the staff screen already had. Without it, replacing a password a classmate watched being typed meant asking an administrator to reset the account back to the admission number.

Changing a password ends every session, so all four password screens now say so and sign the reader out rather than leaving them on a page whose next request fails.

Large amounts, readable

A figure of a million or more now reads as ₦2.49M. On a phone that is what it takes for the number to be legible: written out it does not fit a list row, a summary card's value line or a chart axis, so it was clipped, and the clipping was silent.

Documents of record keep the exact figure. The invoice breakdown and detail, the discount preview, the fee items total, the record payment and refund sheets and the online payment confirmation all still show every digit. A list row is not a document of record, which is why a receipt abbreviates on the row and does not on the screen behind it.

Elsewhere

• A pupil's own grades and attendance filter by period, under one filter bar over both. Attendance opens on the current period and grades on everything: attendance leads with a rate, which only means something over a stated window, where grades are a history whose grouping exists to compare one term with the last.
• Four screens were dead ends. The academic calendar, the family calendar, notifications and the standalone pupils list were each reached in a way that left nothing to go back to. All four now have a back button and an edge swipe that goes where the button goes.
• Settings offers only the phases the school runs. A secondary school with no reception class is no longer shown the early years module, and the report card filter no longer lists early years classes, whose pupils have no card of that kind.
• Settings edits each value with the control it deserves rather than a text box, so the school week's day kinds and the working hours bounds are no longer typed correctly from memory.
• Registration names the sign-in address at all three points in the journey. Administrators routinely try to sign in with the school office address they registered with rather than the personal one they chose: it is the address on everything the school sends, so it is the one they remember, and it is not an account.
• Messaging says when the WhatsApp allowance comes back, as a date for a school whose allowance refills on its own and as "refills when you renew" for one whose renewal grants it.

Fixes

• A long name wrapped one letter per line down the left edge of the users list. Fixed on the shared list card, so every list built on it is fixed with it.
• Backing out of a picker counted as a choice. Dismissing a filter sheet cleared the filter, and on the test form it unset the subject and marked the form unsaved, so changing your mind about opening a picker asked you to save a change you had not made.
• The Users entry appeared for the wrong people. It read the old role column, so an administrator whose role no longer granted staff management still saw it and was refused on tapping, while somebody who genuinely held the permission never saw it at all.
• A mark box accepted more decimal places than the server, so a mark like 8.125 came back as a rejection naming no pupil and no box, on a screen holding sixty of them. It now refuses at the box and names the pupil.
• A failed permissions check read as a refusal, so a teacher on a patchy connection was told they lacked a permission they hold and sent to an administrator who would find nothing wrong.
• Two weekly grade screens overflowed on a narrow phone and at large text sizes, including the family card on exactly the weeks a school has finalised. There are now layout tests at a small width across three text scales.