LOADING STUDENTS
You are now on the road and quickly approaching your first student pickup. If you've driven a bus before using SMART tag, the thought of mixing new technology into the sometimes hectic student loading process might seem overwhelming for established drivers. Loading students onto your bus quickly and safely is actually pretty simple though, and your students might even find it fun.
Here's how you load students onto your bus with SMART tag:
Your tablet is pretty smart at determining where your next stop is. Your next stop is calculated like so:
NEXT STOP CALCULATION
approaching a bus stop
- The GPS inside your tablet calculates your location every second.
- Each of the stops on your route has an expected 'direction' that you should be headed when you enter the (50 - 75 meter) stop radius.
- As you approach a stop, the tablet looks at both the GPS distance from the center of the stop and the direction your bus is heading.
Basically, what you need to know is that as long as you are following the planned route path, your tablet should tell you exactly what stop is next along your route.
When you arrive at a stop, the black non-interactive drive mode screen will switch to this current stop tab on the roster screen through 2 ways:
SWITCHING TO CURRENT STOP SCREEN
current stop highlighted
- You can tap anywhere on the black drive mode screen after your bus has come to a complete stop. Note: there is about a 4 second delay when trying to switch to this screen manually. This is to make sure you've secured your bus -- for safety.
- You can also get to this screen when a student uses their SMART tag to tag onto the bus. Your tablet will automatically switch to this screen when this happens.
When loading students at a stop, you can tell that you are stopping in the correct location because the current stop will be highlighted yellow, as show here.
CURRENT STOP HIGHLIGHTED
The students assigned to this particular bus stop will show up automatically. This can come in handy later when loading students manually!
ROSTER FOR THIS STOP
In our example, the 3rd student to board the bus at this stop forgot her SMART tag. We can quickly load her onto our roster by tapping the 'Load' button next to her name.
TAP STUDENT NAME TO LOAD
manually loading students
TAP STUDENT NAME TO LOAD
confirm manual load
This student is a normal, assigned rider on this route, so we'll just tap 'Load' one more time on this confirmation screen.
CONFIRM TO LOAD STUDENT
TAP STUDENT NAME TO LOAD
student successfully loaded
This student is a normal, assigned rider on this route, so we'll just tap 'Load' one more time on this confirmation screen.
CONFIRM TO LOAD STUDENT
The 'On Bus' goes up 1 student from 3 to 4 as you manually load the student.
ON BUS COUNT INCREASES
TAP STUDENT NAME TO LOAD
stop transitions to next stop
As you leave one stop and head to another, your tablet will switch from the Roster/Routes screen and once again go to 'Drive Mode'.
AUTO SWITCHES TO DRIVE MODE
TAP STUDENT NAME TO LOAD
students loading with a SMART tag
As we saw previously, you CAN load students onto your roster manually. However, most of your students will load the bus with their SMART tag by scanning their tag on your ST Reader.
STUDENTS LOADING WITH TAGS
Your ST Readers and tablets can load students fairly quickly. If the student places the tag in the correct location (right over the yellow SMART tag sticker), the tag should read quickly. You'll see the load confirmation screen, as well as the 'On Bus' number increase.
QUICK LOADING
Make sure to teach your students to take turns scanning their tags in an orderly fashion! If two students try to scan at one time, it will delay to loading process for everyone.
A good rule to follow is to wait 2-seconds between each student scan.
TOO MANY TAGS AT ONCE!
TUTORIAL COMPLETE!
Thanks for following along.
You can head back to the training homepage to view another lesson.
OR YOU CAN
Log-in to your tablet here
TAP STUDENT NAME TO LOAD
COMPLETE!