Hi Tom, Tom Hoffman wrote: > 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. I can also see potential for linking requirements to individual or blocks of lessons in the schedule, with potential for using this as a medium for lesson planning. > > >>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? > > Sounds good to me; my issue was more to do with several different activities contributing to the assessment of the same competency - sorry if I'm not up to speed with the vocab!
>>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? > Sorry, I was once a statistician (probably). It's a scale like IQ with a normal distribution, a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, thus in theory you can convert a score to a percentile (eg 130 is at the 98th percentile - 2% of the population would score higher, or even to a reading (or whatever) age - it would be cool if ST could do this for you! > >>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. > Well, essential might have been overstating the case, but we do a fair bit of statistical analysis of data, generally in Excel, and I think it would be easier to do this via export than odbc or sql stuff, although, come to think of it, the live linkage is appealing, but perhaps harder for most teachers to set up. The NFER here did a study of data use in schools, and found that those schools that used data well for learning and teaching purposes tended to go via home grown spreadsheets rather than the analysis tools built into their MISs. > >>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 > Moodle 1.6 is promised for late Feb or early March, I believe, but I wouldn't hold out too much hope for the web services API, which is only billed as 'basic' (qv http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=36084) - I would be surprised if it went down as far as the gradebook, but who knows? There will be more to come in v 1.7, potentially over the (northern) summer. I've no problem with ST reading or writing straight to a moodle DB, as I see the open nature of the DB as one way of ensuring that open source VLEs are guaranteed to be compatible with any MIS, at this level at least, however I could understand you wanting ST code to be linked too closely to the changes and chances of Moodle development. > Miles. _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
