Re: [school-discuss] EduML/EML/ and others

[David Bucknell <david@members.iteachnet.org>]

I know Les has experience building useful apps. His report card takes into 
account both online input and viewing and also printing.

Whatever he does, we'll have a great foundation for any other functionality -- 
and he uses standard, free software (Perl, php, html, mysql).

I think this is very exciting as it has the potential to build on and 
contribute to a large number of related projects.

One project I wonder if you've looked at with respect to its grade book and 
report card is Schoolmation. Myles O'Meara designed it so that it works in 
international schools with a wide range of grading systems. The report card 
allows the adminsistrator to choose the number of fields, and to give them 
names; it allows (requires you) to choose a grading scale. No 
internationalizing problems. The only thing I don't know about is its ability 
to handle non Western characters.

Since Schoolmation is a user authenticated system, parents can have logins and 
check grades. (Not incidentally, they can also check assignments and what 
their child/ren has/have done in response to them.

The grade book is just a simple record keeper that allows you to choose the 
total points or maximum grade for a particular assignment and name it. Then 
via the ability to search for students via course name, a teacher can quickly 
input all the grades for a particular class.

It has no calculation abilities, however, and these are requested by teachers 
frequently.

Here is an example of what I find frustrating re the open source world. We 
have Les's way and we have Myles' way, and it seems beyond our resources to 
make it easy for them to combine efforts to make a better mouse trap ... er 
report card. 

I hope that folks interested in the grade book will look at Schoolmation as 
well as Les's works and, perhaps, that Les and Myles and others with skill 
greater than mine will consider working together.

My portion of a centime.

David

 Quoting Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>:

> When you have this kind of thing, you usually have a "model"
> implementation. I would say "Write the app and make it work. Get it
> used." Then Model the markup.
> 
> Anything else I would say is premature...
> 
> Les Richardson
> 
> 
> On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Matt Jezorek wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Matt Jezorek wrote:
> > 
> > > Can we not work together to create a draft (W3C Draft) and then present
> it 
> > > to W3C as an Educational Mark Up? I think this is the way to get it done.
> 
> > > We could talk to W3C but then we have to wait on them. If we go ahead and
> 
> > > start a draft then I dont see why we could not push it. 
> > > 
> > > There are others besides open source that can benifit from this and the
> 
> > > publicity from it being done by a group of Open Source Folks can only
> help 
> > > Open Source (multiple agenda's i guess you could call me)
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> > Ohh yeah I ment to say this as well. If we dont want to do that we can 
> > always  do what the HR folks did http://www.hr-xml.org/channels/home.htm
> > 
> > We can do something. We can at least work toward a standard
> > -- 
> > Matt Jezorek 
> > Executive Director / Founder 
> > Blue Linux Group, Inc 
> > http://www.bluelinux.org 
> > matt@bluelinux.org 
> > 
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