Hi All, We're getting ready for a new round of SchoolTool releases next Thursday.
The big news will be the first public release of CanDo, a competency tracking component for SchoolTool originally developed by and for Career and Technical Education in the state of Virginia, and re-written by the SchoolTool team this year to take advantage of the new SchoolTool design and gradebook improvements, and also to be much more generally useful outside of Virginia. So if you need to do any sort of outcomes-based, standards-based, competency-based or some other similar kind of assessment, you'll be able to start doing that within SchoolTool. Even though this is new to the general public, CanDo immediately becomes the most complete, well tested and heavily used part of SchoolTool. In addition to the Career and Technical Centers across Virginia, SchoolTool and CanDo will also be used this year by the international Fab Academy program, by the Alexandria Shipyard program across the US, and for social skills tracking with special education students in Arlington, Virginia. We will also be releasing SchoolTool 2.3. This is not a big feature release, as most of the heavy feature work went into CanDo and some other changes that won't appear until SchoolTool 2.4. Essentially, it is a repackaging of the sequence of fixes that have gone into our recent development releases, documented here: http://book.schooltool.org/2.2-release-notes.html The biggest changes are a new gradebook/journal grid that is faster and supports large number of sheets, and improved XLS import/export. We have also worked on improving LDAP integration, particularly with the Zentyal server distribution. SchoolTool 2.3 and CanDo will NOT be included in the Ubuntu Universe repositories for Precise and Quantal. You will have to add our development package archive off Launchpad to get these releases. Following these releases, we are going to focus the core team (me and three developers) on updating the design of the existing printed reports and adding more across the application (gradebook, CanDo, attendance, etc.) for about a month. We'll release this work as an update to 2.3. We will then work on completing some already in progress changes for 2.4, making sure we have plenty of time to settle the updates into the Ubuntu repositories for their 13.04 release. The big change in this release will be the inclusion of a distributed task queue (celery) and other plumbing necessary to run scheduled or long-running tasks like big imports and reports asynchronously so your browser isn't stuck waiting for a very long request. Expect more details next week! Tom Hoffman SchoolTool Project Manager _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~schooltool-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~schooltool-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
