The time is nigh to write up proposals for the next round of development, which will end with a development milestone release around Christmas. I'm thinking that we should focus on the main teacher-facing screens first, and leave the more baroque back-end problems of attendance and grading until after Christmas.
This is a change from the way I usually think, since I tend to focus first on the back-end modeling issues (I can't help it, it is just the way my brain seems to work). It should be helpful for community participation to do the part that most community members (who are teachers) will interact with first. So for attendance this would be: * realtime class attendance screen, including handling tardies; * homeroom attendance screen (probably slightly different from the regular one); * end-of-day attendace input for teachers (using Ajax livesearch as suggested by Tom Hinkle); * mass entry by clerk; * entry of future absences by a clerk (field trips, etc); * putting absences onto student calendars; * various report screens for teachers, clerks, administrators. Also, we have to finally hardwire default groups or roles for teacher, administrator, clerk and student into SchoolTool. What we won't do in this iteration is anything having to do with the workflow for resolving absences as excused or unexcused. For gradebook: * creating assignments, tests, etc; * assigning assignments to sections; * putting assignments into section calendars; * organizing assignments by type; * creating grading scales; * entering grades and comments for assignments; * entering end of term grades; * various report screens for teachers & administrators. The big thing we will put off here is weighting assignments for grading. We'll just use a simple point system* this time around. Weighting is going to be an ugly hairball, I'm afraid. I've probably not explicitly mentioned or just forgotten some necessary bits. This is a quick outline. If you've got suggestions about how you'd like any of these things to work, now would be a good time to chime in. --Tom * Every assignment, test, etc. will be worth a number of points defined by the teacher. Weighting is determined by just giving the assignment fewer points, e.g., a test is worth 100, quiz is worth 10, homework is worth 1. The score is expressed in points as well. 83/100 or 8/10 or 1/1. _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
