mYnet
Smart School solution in Operation & Administration
YMCA of Hong Kong Christian College
YMCA of Hong Kong Christian College (YHKCC) is an international college with a DSS background in the local community. The School offers both international curriculum - IGCSE curriculum and UK GCE 'A' Level exams, and the local curriculum leading to the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE).
YHKCC currently offers 32 academic subjects with language subjects including English, mainstream Chinese, Putonghua, Practical Cantonese, Practical Mandarin, Spanish and French. Local curriculum will be delivered to students in Form 1 and 2. An integrated curriculum for NSS and IGCSE is offered to Form 3 and 4 students. Students in Form 5 and 6 will be split into separate stream for NSS and IGCSE.
The School has a cross-cultural diversity of students from 43 nationalities including the majorities from UK, USA, India, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Philippines, China and Hong Kong. The teaching staff likewise constitutes a multi-cultural background.
“mYnet” is a school management system aiming to accelerate and streamline the school administration and management operation as well as to provide a centralized platform for students, parents and teachers to access updated information on class schedule, attendance, homework assignment, student record, academic performance and report. It also helps managing schedule in parent days and internal booking of school facility which all form the basic core routines of the daily school administration.
mYnet is also aimed to align with the School’s mission to accomplish a truly Virtue Learning Environment (VLE) in which the strength of educational resources can be leveraged with the adoption of ICT.
Adopting a modular approach with a scalable infrastructure focusing not only on the need of the current environment in YHKCC, mYnet also gears to accommodate the dynamic change in the education services in future.
The core focus in the development of mYnet is to eliminating redundant workflow, increasing operation efficiency and catering the need for future development.
The design concept has to look after the hiccups and constraints in the current situation. The school administration work is heavily loaded with the recent changes of government requirement coupled with the huge workload to fulfill the task requirement from the existing SAM system of the EDB. Furthermore the planning and management of the class schedule is a painful task and has involved tremendous manpower and at the same time easily induces human errors and inaccuracies. The solutions available in the market are carrying packaged features which fail to provide a total solution.
The diversified cultural background of the YHKCC requires significant resources in communications among school administration staff, teachers and parents; and among teachers themselves. The use of technology in creating an effective channel of communication is deemed necessary to break through all barriers and save up resources for teaching and learning purposes.
The design of the system therefore practically focus to shorten the time required for each administration task. In particular for time table management, the system is to untie the deadlocks of planning and scheduling the complicated matrix of the class schedule which involves different time segments, different subject modules for both IGCSE and local DSE curriculum, delegation of teachers and assignment of venues and facilities.
What you see and can get is defined by the role you have taken as a student, parent, teacher or school administrative staff.
The role is assigned by the system administrator.
Role of Teacher
- The teacher’s role is defined by the subject and class they are teaching
Role of Student
- The student’s role is defined by the class and subject they are currently taking. The academic records for classes in early years are also kept and archived to form a complete portfolio for the whole secondary period.
Role of Parent
- The parent’s access is governed by the student’s status and single sign-on is provided for parents with more than one kid studying in school.
Role of Administrator
- The Administrator assigns user role, controls the system settings and takes on the administrative tasks of the functions provided by the system.
For Administrator
- plan and manage the time duration for each lesson, assembly, recess, lunch break and special class activity
- assign lessons for individual subject module for both IGCSE and DSE curriculum within the same class
- assign teacher
- assign venue and book facilities
- data can be modified and updated immediately
For Teachers
- personalized access base on subject and class
- access to free time slot of all teachers to facilitate internal meeting arrangement and further reshuffle of lesson schedule when necessary so as to enhance efficiency in internal co-ordinations
For Students & Parents
- personalized access with timely update
In this module, all internal analysis reports including Progress, Subject, Pastoral, Summary and Internal reports are generated in preset templates. Teachers can easily input the scores of the students by using various weighting and grading methods.
It reports the daily attendance records captured by Octopus access every day and parents can get to know the attendance status of their children either by logging into the system directly or receiving a daily email automatically from the system. Merits and sanctions records are also recorded in this module; hence both parents and teachers can provide appropriate assistance for each student accordingly.
In order to align with the requirement of the New Secondary curriculum, mY OLE is used to keep a full and complete record of the hours of OLE for individual student during the school years. In this module, teachers can assign both teachers and students to a particular activity. Students can submit activity reflection before deadline. Responsible teacher can give grades to the reflections. The OLE students’ reflection entries are kept for the whole secondary term to form a complete OLE portfolio. OLE reports can be generated.
Facility booking
- Teachers can make reservation on room and equipment for special purpose.
Parents’ Day Appointment
- Administrator assigns schedule for Parents’ Day
- Teachers schedule their own break and availability
- Parents book appointment based on available schedule
Teachers distribute homework assignments and students are given with clear check list, detailed instructions, files attachment and deadlines. Parents can know in more details about the school requirement by access the interface and decide for themselves how close they would need to follow up with their kids.
The system will automatically generate from the database individual student’s attendance, home work assignment, merit and sanction, personal message and circular to the parent.
Teachers can also make use of the function to send individual message or bulk message to parents.
Parent having more than one kid in school will receive a consolidated email.
- Provision of a centralized platform
- Eliminate redundancy in school administration
- Consistency of data and materials
- Improve efficiency on administration work
Before 5 staff; 10 man days
Now 2 staff; 2-3 man days
Approximately 88% faster
