What “time in app” tells a form teacher

A Year 4 form teacher in Johor showed us a column labelled time in app. The class average looked respectable. When we asked which period the minutes came from, the honest answer was “after the bell, while bags were being packed.”

Education app analytics will happily add those minutes to a weekly total. A form teacher cannot. The last eight minutes of a period are when reminders are shouted, when a pupil borrows a friend’s tablet, and when a reader is opened to satisfy a chart the school leader pinned on the wall.

We now ask for the raw timestamps, not the weekly sum. If most of the time sits after 12:40 in a school that dismisses at 12:50, we write that down. It does not mean the app is unused. It means the minutes are not evidence of the Bahasa unit you thought you had assigned.

If your export cannot show time of day, say so in the staff meeting. Pretending a total is a lesson is how parent chats fill with screenshots.