As a high school English teacher I find MORGAN PRO to be an invaluable tool in the management of my classroom library. I keep track of what books are checked out and the students to whom they are loaned. You cannot believe the load that has been lifted since downloading MORGAN. It did take a bit of time to enter all 300 books currently in my library, but the time invested has been returned tenfold these past few weeks.
To be honest my initial plans for MORGAN were as a catalog for my CD and album collections. As I started to work with the program it became apparent that it might also serve serious needs in the area of my classroom library. My Filemaker database was nice, but a hassle when making the students come up to the desk to check out books. (Making students enter YOUR domain to do everything doesn't do much to establish rapport). After entering about half of the books into my Newton I began to go around the room, sitting WITH my students as I entered the necessary info to complete a check out. This gave me the opportuniy to discuss their progress while entering the book information.
I liked much of my experience but there were a few areas in which I noted a need for improvement. Entering names in the "Loaned to" field was done manually (Catamount has since installed a name picker button. I suggested this since I wouldn't loan out books to anyone I wouldn't put into my Newton.) and in the overview mode I could not see who had the books (Catamount has since fixed this problem, much to my delight). Nonetheless, the power of this tool was evident. Tonight I received a copy of the 1.01 beta and it was a joy to be able to flip my Newt into landscape mode and see the complete list of author- title- loaned to. Customizing the "Show" option allows me to see all checked out books or even the date they were loaned out.
I feel more effective as a teacher moving freely about the room checking in and out books. This gives me a chance to actually TALK to them about what they are reading. Students now know to raise their hands and hold up their book, allowing me to inconspicuously handle it, when time permits, during the class period.
Tonight I had a vision of how MORGAN might be effectively teamed with the eMate 300 to simplify how individual departments handle their book inventories. This might require that Catamount Software tweak the program or even create an education version, but the result would be a "beamable" book inventory. Set up a department eMate with the full department inventory and then give one to each of the teachers. When they take books to the classroom you beam the info to THEIR eMate. At the end of the year, when they return books to storage, they beam that inventory back to the department's eMate.
This can obviously be extended to all media that teachers borrow from department offices and storage (you can enter books, videos, boots on tape, CDs, etc). Since teachers could enter student text checkouts as well, this could eliminate the need to have media center specialists enter and track the data. Although the same process as for department checkouts could apply here. Desktop connectivity is being handled through Revelar Connection Utilities which will soon have a free "lite" version specifically designed for transfer of data by third party software. This is a "must have" for individual teachers and an essential tool for schools looking to reduce technology costs by going to the eMate. Go ahead and download the demo.
Jeffrey A. See
English Teacher
Oshkosh West High School
Send comments to: info@catamount.com
(last modified : May 9, 1997)