One of the final "must haves" to make SchoolTool a basic student information system is the ability to generate report cards. There are many, many, many other kinds of reports that will be needed and added, but aggregating end of marking period/semester/year scores to be sent home to parents is the most prominent.
The plan is to mostly leverage the SchoolTool gradebook for this. Basically, the site manager will create a special "reportsheet" that will go in the gradebook for each section in a given term. The teachers will fill out the report sheet when report cards are due, and the report card report will pull the grades from these sheets. That's the short description. We jerry-rigged something like this at SLA and it worked fine. The longer description: The manager or school administrator goes to the year > the term > report cards. He selects the "New Report Sheet" action. He gets a form that lets him define columns for the report sheet. Title, id, and score system being the important attributes. In a simple case, this just might be "final" with an A-F score system, that is, the report sheet will just collect a single A-F score for the final term grade. If there are interim marking periods in the term, they could have columns or they might get their own separate sheet. If the report card has multiple descriptors, like "class participation," "effort," or whatever, those would be entered as separate columns. A comment field is also an option. The manager will submit this, and then in a separate step, he can propagate it into the gradebook of each section in the term. At this point, like many things in SchoolTool, you really don't want the worksheets to be deleted or their structure changed -- this is perhaps the most important data in the system, and you don't want to accidentally lose it. OTOH, it has been our experience that people make mistakes ;-). So ultimately we'll have to figure out how to hide these or something for when people deploy them in error. >From the teacher's point of view then, they'll go to their gradebook, and they'll now see an additional work sheet -- the new report sheet. >From their point of view, the report sheet is different in that they can't edit any of the columns or add activities. It should also be a different color to make it immediately obvious that it has a special status. From that point, they can simply enter the scores for each student as they would any other gradebook worksheet. Additionally, you'd like to be able to automatically pull grades from other worksheets. Most commonly you'd just want to import the final grades from the teacher's regular worksheet for the section. Ideally, you'd keep this pretty open ended. The way we discussed doing it in Arlington was to implement the "external activities" feature we've created in the CanDo gradebook in SchoolTool's. The one difference is that in the current external activities implementation, we create a special type of activity that knows it is supposed to pull from another gradebook. In the reportsheet, we don't want to have to change the activity object itself to pull in the scores, so we thought the import could be done more on the view level. That is, perhaps on the top of each column you'd have an 'import' button, which you'd click and then you'd get a form that would let you select another column from another worksheet, CanDo gradebook, or anything else available as an external activity, and then the relevant scores would fill in the cells in the reportsheet via JavaScript. I'll leave the next step -- plugging in the data from the report sheet into a pdf report -- for later. I think that's enough to chew on for now. --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
