Every week on Monday and Thursday from 9:10 a.m. to 9:45 a.m., MVHS students follow a tutorial schedule. Many people walk from class to class looking for a place to work or a teacher to get help. They hope that their teacher is free to talk to, but that’s not always the case. Teachers can get extremely busy and may not able to attend to all the students who come in looking for help.
This is why FlexTime was created.
The tutorial scanning app allows students to make appointments to come in and speak to their teachers. All they have to do is pick a date, select a teacher and see what available appointments there are. While it is not required to make an appointment, those who do will get priority over those who just walk in. Biology and STEM teacher Renee Fallon explained that she uses the app to lessen the amount of students crowding her classroom during tutorial so they can use their time better.
“I have lots and lots of students coming in for various reasons and I was getting these long lines [in my classroom] and students wasting a lot of time in line,” Fallon said. “With this system, they can make an appointment during tutorial and all they have to do is scan their ID and if someone pops up who has an appointment, they get dibs.”
The idea of the tutorial scanning app was created back in August but was only implemented just over a week ago, and teachers finally had time to start using it. Fallon explained that her plan was to use the app for a semester and ask her students how they felt about it and whether it helped at all.
Junior Varna Chandar, a student in Fallon’s AP Biology class, explained that she thought the app would be effective in terms of better planning her time during tutorial. The app would help avoid standing in lines when one could be working.
“Because so many people go talk to [Fallon] during tutorial, having an app where you are able to schedule appointments will be really helpful,” Chandar said. “[Especially] in terms of not wasting time just to talk to [her].”
Chandar explained that there are usually other things she needs to do during tutorial aside from talking to her teachers. Because of her time constraint, she said that the app would create a better way for her to use tutorial more wisely.
Freshman Anika Sharma agrees with Chandar in that she, too, has had to wait in long lines to go talk to some of her teachers when she could have been doing homework or talking to another teacher. She felt that the app would help her avoid this problem.
“Generally harder teachers are always [busier] and you can never really get anything done because everyone else also has to talk to them,” Sharma said. “Sometimes I’ve had to come [into the classroom] several times to turn something in because [they] haven’t had time for me.”
Both Chandar and Sharma have high expectations for the app, and hope that they can regulate their tutorial time more effectively and plan ahead to talk to certain teachers. Although the app was just released, more and more teachers are beginning to use it for the benefit of their students and themselves. Fallon explained that she is going to continue using it throughout the semester and will ask her students for feedback at the end of the year. The app will soon be used more widely amongst teachers to make students’ tutorials more effective and to help with their time management.
