iPad Requisition Sheets/Systems

magnaflourious

magnaflourious

Hi all, hope you've all had a lovely week. We're getting towards the end of the year and, as usual, the 'fun' lessons commence! This, however, has highlighted a flaw in our weekly iPad requisition system, where teachers are booking 5/6/7 lessons worth of iPads as soon as the excel spreadsheet is released on a Thursday, This is leaving some teachers with absolutely no chance to book any if they happen to be busy for the first 25 minutes after the spreadsheet is released, so we've been brainstorming a few ideas for a more just system and were wondering if any of this wonderful community had any suggestions?

For reference, we have 13 teachers so its a fairly big department (and school), though some book them a lot more than others and some never book them at all. (edit; also forgot to mention we have 30 iPads)
 
Vee

Vee

Thats tough.... we have 5 teachers and 2 trainess, and 12 ipads.
one teacher ALWAYS books them in before anyone else, and he has had comments from everyone regarding this. so I totally feel your pain.
you may be able to split them up into 2 sets of 15 if that is at all possible, and you can try to say one set reserved for teachers a,b,c and the other set for teachers x,y,z.
other than that it might be worth having a chat to the repeating offenders to see if they dont mind doing/using something, to give someone else a chance...

good luck with the dilemma
edit - sorry i cant be more help in terms of a fair system
 
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Annie

Annie

Can you see timestamps on when things are added? If so, then it might be possible to honour the first request from each teacher, leave time for others to add requests, then open it up to more requests if there are still slots. Alternatively, if there is a particular year group/activity that it is more crucial to have the iPads for, then prioritise those requests? Both of those do potentially increase your workload though.

It is also something that probably needs a collaborative effort. Make the problem clear and see if a) any of the teachers have suggestions or b) put a rule in place along the lines of the above and call out teachers that are ignoring it (maybe by denying them use of the iPads at all that week). If that isn't working, it is more of a management problem than a requisition problem and you should feel confident handing it over to the HoD to manage instead.

It is an awkward problem, sorry I can't be more help.
 
magnaflourious

magnaflourious

Vee said:
Thats tough.... we have 5 teachers and 2 trainess, and 12 ipads.
one teacher ALWAYS books them in before anyone else, and he has had comments from everyone regarding this. so I totally feel your pain.
you may be able to split them up into 2 sets of 15 if that is at all possible, and you can try to say one set reserved for teachers a,b,c and the other set for teachers x,y,z.
other than that it might be worth having a chat to the repeating offenders to see if they dont mind doing/using something, to give someone else a chance...

good luck with the dilemma
edit - sorry i cant be more help in terms of a fair system
Click to expand...
The two sets of 15 idea is a solid shout; see if we can get an even distribution of teacher requests on both sides to reduce the load on either set. Thank you for the advice!
Annie said:
Can you see timestamps on when things are added? If so, then it might be possible to honour the first request from each teacher, leave time for others to add requests, then open it up to more requests if there are still slots. Alternatively, if there is a particular year group/activity that it is more crucial to have the iPads for, then prioritise those requests? Both of those do potentially increase your workload though.

It is also something that probably needs a collaborative effort. Make the problem clear and see if a) any of the teachers have suggestions or b) put a rule in place along the lines of the above and call out teachers that are ignoring it (maybe by denying them use of the iPads at all that week). If that isn't working, it is more of a management problem than a requisition problem and you should feel confident handing it over to the HoD to manage instead.

It is an awkward problem, sorry I can't be more help.
Click to expand...
Sadly no timestamps on the spreadsheet, but the prioritising for year group/activity is interesting; speaking about this with the other technicians here has raised the concern of the teachers saying they need the set for a lesson more important than they're letting on - they wouldn't, would they? (Narrator: they would). We're gonna ponder it over the weekend, but there's been a suggestion about having a priority ranking feature added to the spreadsheet from this reply, details to be ironed out, but thank you for the advice!
 
magnaflourious

magnaflourious

Techno said:
Not really your problem to sort out, let them fight amongst themselves!
Click to expand...
St Caths Crew said:
Sounds like a HOD problem to raise with the team to sort out.
Click to expand...
Dave T said:
I concur - pass it up to HoD, and sit back with a coffee and a biscuit or 2 and watch the arguments commence....! :)
Click to expand...
If we can't think of a better system then we are definitely taking the backseat with biscuits approach and leaving things how they are, just have to give them a friendly reminder on how to be nice and share!
 
C

clairelucas

COMMITTEE
Rotation of teachers with first dibs on them each week? Can always be allocated further down the teacher list if not needed...
 
Paul

Paul

We had a set of tablets, I made a booking sheet (paper) first come first served, if someone has booked them tough..
 
Technician Q

Technician Q

It's just first come first served here BUT they can see what other's have booked so should take that into account and they will ask "X has asked for Y on Tuesday - do we have enough that I can have it too?" before actually booking it.

It sounds to me like your HoD probably needs to bring it up at a meeting - can your lot see each other's requests? We have our sheet laid out in a room by period timetable that they add requests to so it's fairly obvious that someone else has something booked at the same time and pretty easy to check what it is.
 
Technician Q

Technician Q

Also worth noting is we use Google sheets and the iPad app is so much clunkier to use than on a PC or chromebook so I only use the iPad for viewing requests - is there a tech issue making it difficult to see what's going on?
 
ClaireS

ClaireS

If I get more requests than ipads/laptops I email the teachers concerned and ask them to speak to each other and sort it out as to who is having what and to let me know!
I can't be bothered trailing between them trying to arrange it for them! They know if they really need them and if they could use them a different day.
 
Paul

Paul

Technician Q said:
It's just first come first served here BUT they can see what other's have booked so should take that into account and they will ask "X has asked for Y on Tuesday - do we have enough that I can have it too?" before actually booking it.

It sounds to me like your HoD probably needs to bring it up at a meeting - can your lot see each other's requests? We have our sheet laid out in a room by period timetable that they add requests to so it's fairly obvious that someone else has something booked at the same time and pretty easy to check what it is.
Click to expand...
When we had actual paper text books they used to just pinch them off each other, so we stopped being involved.

HoD was the worst
 
Alex@Bunsen

Alex@Bunsen

Creator of bunsen.education
Site Sponsor
Hi magnaflourious, I've built a requisitions app that could manage this for you, with timestamps included to help prioritise reservations - https://bunsen.education. If you record your 30 iPads as a 'limited resource', it will restrict the number of iPads that can be booked out at once. It's completely free for schools (we're funded by a UKRI Government grant).
 
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