Management Information Systems (MIS) in Schools

INTRODUCTION

These days, which we describe information era as various technologic developments have been practiced; the leading risk that an organization could obtain is to hang about tactless to change. A lot of important factors such as constant developments in information technologies, information exchange, and increasing and increasing the expectation of the society to a great extent, recent administration perceptions and applications cause organizations none over the world to develop new applications during order to remain. Because of their priority in modern societies, Information Technologies have reached an state of high main concern in learning, too. Recently, contributions of information technology to education have been among the mostly emphasized subjects.

Every country aims to make available their citizens with the most existing education in the line of their monetary competence. In support of this reason, immense investment plans about the use of information systems encompass been put into action all around the world.

Inside our country, too, in order to prop up Primary Education Program, 600 million $ of loan in total was taken out within World Bank on June 25, 1998 and July 26, 2004. In the first section of the line up, on least two primary schools in each of the 921 countries of Turkey were prepared in conditions of in order technologies and then activated. In commission training courses in relation to the use of computer in main education which was given to 2.250 coordinators of information technology section and 35.000 teachers were financed. In the following section of the plan ending on February 28, 2006, it is projected that information technology software are circulated to the 3.000 primary education schools just about Turkey and education doorway is established.

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As a result of training 600 computer teachers, in-service teaching is designed for all the primary school inspectors functioning on the pasture, and for at least 106.381 educators shaped of managers and teachers of main schools which have or will have information technology classes, on use of information technologies in learning and use of educational software, which will be ready in line with recent instruction programs

School Management Information Systems

Being at the commencement stage of the School Management Information Systems, mechanization of the school management is the necessary subject of today’s school management. Principals have ongoing to make use of information systems in the gradually-increasing each day management staffs. Frequently speaking, the reasons to use information systems can be declared as increasing helpfulness at work by handing out information, rising managerial effectiveness by meeting the need for information and obtain supremacy in competitions by directing strategies. School management in sequence systems aim to offer maintain for the managing and educational behavior of the school managers by hand out information.

Telem (1999) define the management information in his words as “an executive information system planned to match the structure, management task, instructional process and particular needs of the school”.

According to board definition which defines, hand-outs of the information systems to schools can be defined as making programs more successful, making the teaching process and the changes in learning environment professional, enable teachers to swap their experiences in a more well thought-out way, working in teams, shaping the needs of the students, supporting the school managers and other staff in doing their duty, developing their performances, inefficiency and efficiencies. In other words, school management information systems increase effectiveness and efficiency by saving time and facilitate development of alternative solutions for advanced problems

Information systems sustain not only information process but also make the support in innovations. Since being amendable to different changes, these systems are helpful to manage with the load for change. Therefore, school management in sequence systems improve the version of the school to the environment. They enable the school to realize and define internal and external information transfer. In this attitude, school management independently meets the demands and hopes of its inner and outside members; and ensures that school activities are arranged perfectly and on time.

Beginning of school management information systems to schools have force major changes in the role as well as work styles of managers. School management information systems have changed school management in the areas of management, choice making, workload, human resource management, communication, responsibility and planning.

With intent school management information systems hold up the manager in shaping the aims of the school, making long term plans for possible, distributing resources, and producing educational methods of future, seminal performances of teachers and success of the school. In this trend, school management information systems can also be used as a device to begin and use educational direction of the manager.

School managers can make more better and reliable decisions when they get rectify and up-to-date information by school executive information systems (Christopher, 2003). Option making is careful as the heart of educational management and shows the significance. Every day, challenging circumstances that need decision making are based on the complex and unpredicted nature of school surroundings. For this reason, as a problem solver, the educational manager has to collect and examine information constantly.

In addition to this, managers have been necessary to make more and quick decisions in short times because of the rising prospect from the educational system (Christopher, 2003). In addition, decision making become faster, more regular and more complicated in schools of in the present day. In order to make decisions under such situation, taking and collecting data that is incessant, up-to-date and that can be accessed promptly and analyzing and using this data is a commitment.

Success of school development studies are frequently depends on data based decision making, though school managers are not able to use the data professionally in this side.

School management information systems give information and a diversity of reports from the database in order to make decisions in line with the aim of the school and make easy controlling of the tricks to achieve the aim. Information technology helps the manager to access, manage and report the information fastly and with no trouble. While telecommunication nets offer the manager with broad resources of information that can be used in problem solving, written communication has been developed richer by means of word processors and e-mails.

increased school principles, supported decisions on the stage of control and planning, improved the power of teaching programs, facilitated student-teacher communication, enlarged the skill between teachers, facilitated methodical and continuous information transfer to parents, and increased communication with more institutions and the central organization.

In his study where Gurr (2000) examined possessions of information system on school manager of local school, he strong-minded that information system have generally changed the role of school manager. Managers confirmed that a manager who does not use the information systems is not able to attain his duties suitably anymore. Lastly, Anderson and Dexter (2005) in their studies inattentive that technology leadership of school managers is of more important than the backdrop in the efficient use of technology at schools.

On the other pass in literature there are researches that show that school managers had troubles in using school management information systems.

For example Viscera and Bloemen (1999) in their study with 195 managers and teachers work in 63 high schools in Holland found out those school management information systems were regularly used in everyday work and managers and teachers did not have enough education on the system. Managers and teachers pointed that while school management information systems had encouraging effects on estimation of efficiency of the school, progress of using sources, superiority of educational programming and in-school communication, it increased their heavy workload and caused stress.

The research indicated that this stress is reduced in schools where education is sufficiently given on the system and where innovation is clearly declared as a vision. And moreover it was found that the staff that used the system had top motivation, was devoted to take more education, and adopted the vision of the school more. According to this research where Warren (1998) examined the belongings of information systems on educational decision making, he establish out that school managers have not taken enough education on efficient use of the information technologies.

Crouse (1994) found that education improved the prospect to use the information systems. Also Jacops (1992) claimed that there was a relationship between the amount of education the managers took, and the use of information technologies. As a result, it can be stated that school managers had to take over the responsibility of leadership in an unknown area without adequate education.

It is cleared as we can see communication and information technologies have progressively more had a role on the behavior of schools. During this era, a lot of things have been spooked and written about the significance of computers.

Though there are large number researches on the role and need of information technologies in education, numerous of these are about the educational functions of information systems and just a hardly any of them are about school management. We can say that in other words, although there are countless researches on the position of information systems on class and teaching, only some studies have been done on the use of them in educational management and their effects on the managers.

The objective of this learning is to look at the use of information systems in school management and to figured out ideas of managers about managerial information systems. In this aspect, following questions were searched:

1. How are the information technology facilities in primary schools in Edirne?
2. What are the studies done by using managerial information systems in primary schools in Edirne?
3. What are the contributions of managerial information systems and the problems in primary schools in Edirne?

METHOD

Research Model:

The mock-up of this research, which targets to look at the use of information systems in school management and to figure out ideas of managers regarding managerial information systems, is review model.

Population:

Population of this research is created of school managers working in 170 primary schools in Edirne. However managers from 98 schools responded to questionnaires. Among the school managers built-in in the research, 26 of them have worked for 1-5 years (26.5%), 25 of them for 6-10 (25.5%), 18 of them for 11-15 (18.4%), 9 of them for 16-20 (9.2%), and 14 of them have worked for 21 and more years (14.3%). 25 of the participants (25.5%) are undergraduate, 69 (25.5%) of them are graduate and just one of them (25.5%) is a post-graduate. in the middle of the school managers included in the research, six of them didn’t react to question about occupational experience and three of them didn’t respond to question in relation to education level.

Data Collection and Analysis:

A survey was urbanized as an tool of data collection. In the first part of the survey, there were some items relating to the personal information of the school managers like as vocational experience and study level. Following part tells us about, the stuff were regarding information technology facilities related to the information systems of the school and opinions of the school managers about technological facilities.

The items about the number of the computers in the school and number of the computers joined to the Internet were open-ended and later, they were classifying after examining their distributions. Participants were predictable to select among the options offered for the items about the places of the computers and the ones joined to the Internet and also the software’s used. Finally, there were open-ended items related to the places to check with in case of a problem about the program and the ones related to dependability. third part of the survey shows the, there were items correlated to the studies finished with the school managing information systems and items about by whom these studies were done. This stuff was separated into two parts as the preparation of various documents, lists and statistics, and data entry. The fourth part consisted of the contributions of managing information systems to school management and problems occurred.

These items were in the form of five point liker scale. Options were declared as; “Strongly disagree”, “Disagree”, “Undecided”, “Agree” and “Strongly Agree”. The answers were ordered from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” by ranking them from 1 to 5. The fifth part contains experiences of school managers in information systems and effects of managing information systems to the manager. In this part, school managers were asked questions about their experiences in information systems and the effects of managing information systems to their managerial efficiencies and work-related development. Options were ordered as; “Strongly disagree”, “Disagree”, “Undecided”, “Agree” and “Strongly Agree”. The answers were ordered from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” by giving them grading them 1 to 5. And n this part, to determine the validity of feedback form was used the technique of content-related validity according to the opinions of the experts,

At the end of the study, the data were analyzed by evaluate their arithmetic average, standard deviation and frequencies and percentages.

FINDINGS:

The answer of the study were existing under the titles of information technology services of schools, studies done with the managing information systems in schools, contributions of managing information systems to school management, and the problems faced, information system experiences of school managers and effects of information systems to them.

Information System practice of School Managers and Their outcome to the Managers

Under this title information system experiences of the school managers and effects of management information systems to the managers were presented. Here are the findings about school managers’ experiences and frequencies of computer and the Internet use and the education they received about these subjects, which were the indicators of school managers’ information system experiences: the level of computer use of the %32.7 of the school managers was basic level, %54.1 of them was average and %12.4 of them was advanced. Managers stated that their frequencies of computer use (=3.58) and internet use (=3.22) were at a medium level. %81.6 of the school managers received education about working with computers. On the other hand, %77.6 of them answered the question “Would you like to receive education about computers?” as “yes”. Findings about the effects of management information systems to the managerial effectiveness of the school managers were presented in Table 10 and findings about their effects to the managers’ vocational development were presented in Table 11.

DISCUSSION

According to the outcome of this study which was regarding the usage of School Management Information Systems in primary schools and which mean to decide the viewpoints of the school managers associated to management information systems, it was experienced that the number of computers was not sufficient and there was only one computer joined to Internet in nearly all of the schools. Besides, in a small number of of these schools, there was a web page

of the school. Study which was conducted by the Pelgrum (2001) in 26 countries and by Mentz and Mentz(2003) in the schools of South Africa, it was seen that one of the most common hurdles of the applications of management information systems was the insufficiency of the numbers of the computers.

Due to this reason, it can be said that there was an important infrastructure problem of the recognition of school management’s information systems in today’s schools. As Greg rash stated (2004) the uniformity with technological improvements increased with the practice of technology. For that reason, it is compulsory to provide educators chiefly school managers with sufficient technological chances to make them accept and go with the improvements. The problems encountered demonstrate the necessity that the applications of information system should be done in the scope of a useful program.

Besides, there is a vital difference among the schools in terms of having these technologies. This inequity makes us think that there is some inequality connected to the usage of these technologies’ opportunities not only for the manager and teachers but also for the students. This situation shows that there is a possibility of coming face to face with the problem which is discussed extensively and called “digital division” not only nationwide but also in the schools in the similar province.

In addition, it was seen that there are still some school managers and assistant school managers who don’t have a computer in their rooms at the schools in the scope of this study. In the middle of the school managers and assistant school managers who have a computer in their rooms, some of them use a computer without an Internet contact. Besides there are some schools whose teachers do not have the opportunity of making use of the information technologies. This is also is seen that The Ministry of Education’s objective (MEB, 2002) which is supplying each staffroom with at least two computers; supplying guidance service, library, school managers with Internet access in order to talk with the central and provincial offices and also for the practice of management has not been achieved yet.