On 1/17/06, Miles Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Tom, > > I'm impressed by your curriculum and assessment slides, which I just > about followed.
Hi Miles, et al., Those slides are here if you haven't seen them: http://www.schooltool.org/products/schooltool-2006/documentation/tutorial/design-documents/st-story.pdf/file_view If you could "just understand them," that's good. It is hard to try to write something that'll be useful to developers and teachers. > Some of our requirements might have evaluations using > different scoring systems - that wouldn't be an issue would it? As the system is designed now, you could: a) create an activity, b) set the default scoring system for the activity (say, A-F scale) c) override the default with a different system (say, pass-fail) for individual students One thing Stephan and I were discussing yesterday is how important it is to support multiple assessments of the same activity. It is much faster and cleaner internally to build the system around the assumption that each activity has one assessment per student. The system will be flexible enough that we would be able to allow multiple assessments at a later date without too much trouble. Do you need multiple assessments of individual activities for each student? > I also enjoyed Stephan's gradebook user stories - I think it would be > important to write a whole set of grades on a particular evaluation via > a single page, using just tab (or whatever) to move between students - > there are also occasions when one might wish to enter several grades for > a student at once, eg when transcribing marks from an exercise book to > the grade book (OK, I know I'm supposed to do this at the time, but > sometimes I've been known to leave them until the weekend...), so > editable rows as well as columns would make sense here. Yes, I see your point. We're trying to avoid creating a giant grid form with hundreds of cells, but allowing the teacher to work per student in addition to per assignment makes sense. > Scoring systems here include standardized scores N(100,15^2), Not sure what you mean by N(100, 15^2)... 100 - 225? > national > curriculum levels, and sub-levels so eg 5c is one stop up from 4a, and > more traditional marks and grades. It would also be nice to be able to > add comments to grades. Yes. I left that out for clarity. > Tom Hoffman wrote: > > Hi All, > > > > Two quickies: > > > > 1) Our primary gradebook will be web-based. One obvious and > > straightforward (for us, at least) way to allow teachers to enter > > grades offline and upload them is to use spreadsheets. That is, > > they'd be able to go to the website and download a spreadsheet file > > that they'd enter their grades into and then upload. Stephan Richter, > > who is working on the gradebook, has used this kind of system with > > Blackboard, so he understands it pretty well. > > > > On the other hand, I know from experience that giving teachers > > spreadsheets can be dicey, since they can get overly ambitious and > > rearrange things or enter the wrong kind of data sometimes. Things > > that a web or other client would catch. > > > > So (I guess this has two parts), do you think your teachers would use > > the spreadsheet method if it was available? And do you teachers > > currently use any other kind of gradebook client that they like well > > enough to continue using? > > Spreadsheet export would be essential. Essential for what? I was thinking that export would only be useful if you were also importing. > Import would only be useful for > those with a PC but no broadband connection - I can think of one or two > for whom this is the case at the moment, but we're working on it. > > High up the list for other clients would be some interface with Moodle's > gradebook - ideally so exercises done on Moodle would automatically > populate the ST gradebook, and once the gradebook editing interface in > Moodle stabilizes it would be nice to have the option of using this to > write grades into ST - perhaps this latter is a bit too optimistic, but > ATM we have a majority of students who complete work online via Moodle > (for maths at least...) and a small number whose work I mark on paper, > grades for which I can transcribe via Rob Beracca's Moodle gradebook mod > into Moodle (see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=24881) Hmm... the question is how to approach Moodle integration. Let's take it for granted that we aren't going to wait to do what I would consider The Right Way, using SIF. Given that, we can wait for Moodle 1.6 and hope we can get Moodle web services to work with SchoolTool services, or we can just make SchoolTool plunge its fangs into Moodle's database. The latter option is probably the most likely to work quickly. Any thoughts? --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
