Apps teachers made — Biology Hub

2 apps · both for macOS

Classroom
Seating Plan
Drag photographs into chairs. A plan for a new class in about five minutes. macOSNeeds iSAMS What it does →
Pastoral
Birthday Reminder
Tells you whose birthday it is each morning, before you teach them. macOSNeeds iSAMS What it does →
Add yours
Made something other teachers keep asking for? Send me the link. How →

Nothing leaves your machine. No account and no server — each app runs locally and talks to nobody. Your classes sit in a folder you can open, read and delete yourself.
You need iSAMS. Three reports give the full picture — the Export Wizard file, the Students Simple Report and the Student ID Badge. Fewer still work, with less on the cards. Without iSAMS there is nowhere for either app to get your class from.
macOS will ask the first time. These are not signed by Apple, so it checks with you before running one. Each app's read-me shows the three clicks. You do it once.

Draw the room once, then drag faces into chairs

Export your class from iSAMS, drop the reports on the app, and it has every name and photograph. Lay the room out to match your own — benches, tables, the board, the door — and drag students into chairs. The first plan for a new class takes about five minutes.

Every chair shows the student's photograph, so you learn names in the first week
Calls each student what they actually go by, not only what the register says
Shuffle the class, sort them A–Z, or move two people apart in one drag
Mark who needs support, who needs the front, who should not sit together — in colours only you can read, not in words a student can read over your shoulder
Save more than one plan for the same class and switch between them, so the layout you use for a practical is not the one you use for a test
Print it for your folder, or put it on the board the right way round for the class to find their own seats

A window that finds you, in the morning

Wishing a fourteen-year-old a happy birthday costs nothing and lands more than most of what we do that week. It fails because nobody tells you in time. This checks when you log in and within five minutes of you opening the lid, then leaves you alone for the rest of the day.

Weekend birthdays are shown on the Friday, so you can say it in person
If your Mac was shut for a few days, it tells you who you missed
It notices a projector and hides the name and photograph until you click, so a birthday is never put on the board in front of the class
A calendar of the whole year, and one place to set what you actually call each student

Put your app on the shelf

This shelf is not only mine. If you have written something that makes teaching easier, put it in a public GitHub repository and send me the link — I will add it here.

One thing I will ask: if your screenshot shows a class, use invented names and no real photographs.