I've looked over the report I wrote for Mark on SchoolTool's progress this year, and I don't see any reason not to send it out to the list in unedited form:
2007 SchoolTool Report ====================== Tom Hoffman Overview -------- The basic changes in process we made this year were effective. Development has moved forward much more steadily and consistently than in the past and more closely aligned with the immediate needs of schools. Local funding of active CanDo development has boosted our base of developers and testers, addressing our most pressing constraints. Our school/developer relationship in Brussels did not work out, at more of a cost of time than money. Code ---- We've now got running code being tested or used in production for our major components: - Demographics: Ignas wrote a simpler demographics package to meet the needs of the Vilnius Lyceum and CanDo. It is being used at both sites. There is still a lot of functionality to be built on this base--primarily reports--but the foundation is solid. - Gradebook: Alan Elkner picked up development of the gradebook module Stephan Richter started last year. It is currently used by Jeff Elkner. Ian Benson will be using it to gather data from maths teachers in eight schools in the UK using his Tizard curriculum. The CanDo competency-based gradebook is also being used in production in the Arlington Career Academy. - Attendance: Ignas has implemented a "journal" attendance and grading application for the Vilnius Lyceum, which allows teachers to enter a grade for each meeting of the class or mark and absence. The Computer Science department at the Lyceum is currently testing this. Going forward, this will become the standard SchoolTool attendance system. - Calendaring: The calendaring code has been cleaned up and improved with input from CanDo and testing at Vilnius Lyceum. It needs more testing and tightening in real use. Other ongoing code issues: - Interoperability. We funded initial LDAP integration via the Tizard project; Ignas is doing further work on it for use at Vilnius Lyceum. We are planning on supporting CAS for single-sign-on with popular PHP apps used in schools like Moodle. We've got a simple CAS implementation already using existing open source code. - Releases. As you know, the Zope 3 world was in turmoil this year, especially regarding packaging, and particularly for us the (non-)release of Zope 3.4. Once it is released we will stick with Zope 3.4 as long as possible, because a lot of the burden of packaging Zope 3 and related components for Ubuntu and Debian has fallen upon us. We have worked under Brian Sutherland's direction on a set of Ubuntu packages for the past six months. We had a set of packages ready for Gutsy but they could not be included in the distribution due to the non-release of Zope 3.4. We subsequently created a new snapshot and developed some scripts to generate packages using the Launchpad PPA, which makes the packaging process much easier going forward. Unfortunately, we also discovered an arcane bug in the PPA, which is now being addressed, but in the meantime, we haven't done a full public release. Since our installation story is now just "apt-get install schooltool", there is no sense in making a release until the packages work. Big pieces missing from the code: - Dealing with the passage of time, terms, history. For example, when a student transfers between classes during a term, they can't simply be deleted from the old section, we need to retain the records from that section and keep it integrated in reports for the term. These are issues that touch all parts of the application and will be Ignas's main development priority in 2008. - Reports. A general release of SchoolTool will at minimum have to have a large set of standard report templates. In 2008 we'll be writing a lot of custom reports for partner schools and deriving standard ones for general distribution. - More ways to get data in and out from other applications. Developers ---------- Ignas: Switching Ignas to working full time on SchoolTool and acting as "lead developer" and maintainer has been immensely helpful in getting the project back on solid footing. Put simply, SchoolTool now functions like an organized open source development project, not a loose aggregation of contractors managed by a teacher. Ignas has been available and responsive to me and other participants in the project and demonstrated strong leadership when needed. Jean-Francois Roche: When we started working with Jean-Francois, we were at a point where we needed to find both a developer and a local school. I think we did ok with Jean-Francois, but the school he (and Nicolas Pettiaux) found didn't pan out. They just weren't sufficiently engaged in the project, and Jean-Francois ended up with an unmotivated and uncooperative "customer." This caused repeated delays, required increasing nagging to get information from the school, and with plenty of other (higher-paying) work he could do, Jean-Francois just ended up spending less time on SchoolTool than we would have liked him to. The work he did do was fine, and his billing was in line with the work completed. After our meeting at the beginning of November, Jean-Francois and I decided to dissolve the partnership with the school, I gave him some work to do on the SchoolTool calendar for the rest of the year, and we left open the possibility of part-time work on SchoolTool next year. Alan Elkner: An experienced Java developer, Alan started working on learning Zope 3 and SchoolTool, and open source development processes, about a year ago. During the summer he did substantial paid work on CanDo to close up bugs and add features before and after the beginning of school. After CanDo's budget was exhausted, I started paying him with unused development funds to continue CanDo bugfixes (some of which are SchoolTool bugs regardless) as necessary and work on the SchoolTool gradebook. Once he climbed the Zope 3 learning curve, Alan became a very useful and productive member of the team. He has the right disposition for following through with this work. He's older, not interested in developing new web framework features, just used to writing functional, unsexy software for users. He takes Ignas's advice and direction well. His steady reliability is exactly what we need now. CanDo Interns: We funded $10,000 worth of work on CanDo by student interns. Jeff Elkner ran a very active program through the spring to train high school students to do SchoolTool and CanDo development. About three students are genuinely productive Zope 3 developers (which, as you know, is hardly easy). Given the scarcity of Zope 3 developers and the effort already spent training them, we are trying to keep them engaged. Schools ======= Vilnius Lyceum -------------- Ignas has primarily worked with the three teachers in the computer science department at the school, which is probably sufficient right now. When I met with them in Vilnius, it was clear that having local users had given Ignas a much more focused sense of the requirements and how reality conflicted with his "beautiful abstractions." I pushed to have Ignas visit the school weekly to get feedback in person, and that seems to be helpful as well. Given that Ignas will also be responsible for the remaining chunk of core development and organizing releases in 2008, keeping a small but active group of testers at Lyceum is more important than scaling up to the whole school. Lycée Emile Jacqmain -------------------- This is the school in Brussels. We have stopped working with them due to a lack of interest on their part. Science Leadership Academy -------------------------- Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia was one of the schools we hoped to partner with in 2006, when we found that partnership didn't work without a local developer. It is essentially the perfect school for us to work with in terms of capacity. It is a small, innovative school with a 1-to-1 laptop program, a sys admin on site and good professional development support. Most importantly, the principal, Chris Lehmann, developed open source administrative software (in PHP) as a teacher at his former school. As is usually the case, it was too specific to that school to be portable to his new school, but he not only knows exactly what he needs, he can often show you an example. The good news is that Alan Elkner moved to Philadelphia this fall, so we now have our local developer. I flew down last month (another advantage, I can easily fly there and back in a day) and Alan, Chris and I met. They are both excited about working together. I know Chris will push hard to get SchoolTool to do what he needs and deploy it school-wide in the fall. In particular, he is interested in student and parent access to data on SchoolTool and basic integration, including single sign on, with Moodle and Drupal. Tizard Schools -------------- Ian Benson approached us via The Shuttleworth Foundation, interested in using SchoolTool to help gather data from research he's conducting using his maths curriculum. In the spring we funded his team's work to add LDAP integration to SchoolTool, allowing him to sync data back to his LDAP server from the schools. We are currently funding their packaging of SchoolTool for distribution and deployment to 8 test schools in the UK. I don't like operating at an additional level of remove from the actual schools, but since they have some development capacity, and I had funds available, we've tried this route. The deployment is currently behind schedule. Hopefully it will be completed before the end of the calendar year so payments won't be rolled over to the next year. _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
