Working with no signal

BenoEdu is built for the school day, not the demo. The connection is optional; the app is on the device — a phone, a laptop, the office computer.

#What works with no connection at all

• Taking the register. Open the class, mark who is here, save. It is stored on the device and sent the moment there is a line — as the register you took, at the time you took it.
• Entering marks. Marks, assignment grades and gradebook edits queue the same way.
• Sitting a quiz or practice paper. A student can start and finish a paper offline. It is marked when it arrives. A paper that arrives late is scored and flagged, never thrown away — on these connections, throwing it away would punish the network, not the student.
• Reading what you have already opened. Your classes, the pages you visited this week, and anything you saved with Save for offline — a worksheet, a past paper — are on the device.
• Recording a fee payment at the office.
• Your own timetable. A student's or a teacher's week, and what is next — worked out from the device's own clock, so it is right in a corridor with no signal. It is kept ready on the device, so it opens even on a phone that has never visited it.
• Taking the staff register at the office.

#What needs the internet

• Signing in — once. After that the device stays signed in. On a school with a school box, a phone or computer that has signed in once can work for two weeks without seeing the internet again.
• Resetting a password.
• Creating a class or a course, setting when a class meets, drawing the whole-school timetable, promoting students, changing permissions — the things that other people's work depends on. These are refused offline rather than queued, so nothing is ever built on a record that has not arrived yet.

#What it costs

Once the app is on the device, a normal page is about 3 KB — a few hundred pages for the price of one photo. The first open is bigger, so do it on Wi-Fi. Nothing large is downloaded without somebody pressing a button: a textbook, a past paper, a class's worth of materials each ask first and say how much.

#If two people change the same thing

The second one to save is shown both values and chooses — keep mine or take theirs. Nothing is silently overwritten.

#Shared computers

On a lab or office machine, tick This is a shared computer when signing in. The session ends when the browser closes, and nothing about the school is kept on that machine afterwards.

#The one habit that matters

Take the register every day, even when the line is down. Everything else in BenoEdu is built on the register being real.