Large Scale Integration

[David Kirtley <sabecon@sabecon.hiline.net>]

> <http://www.thinkwave.com> and <http://www.edusolve.com> 
>respectively) seemed
>  to be complete administrative systems.  Could you take a look at 
>them and
> let us know if either of them have the elements you're thinking of? 
> I was
> thinking that our gradebook program could benefit from being  
>integrated into
> a larger framework.
> 
The one from thinkwave is a small start in the right direction. The 
one from edusolve doesn't look that interesting.

What I envision is a little bit more elaborate.

Here is my take on the situation.

Most of the available programs I have seen are geared to secondary as 
opposed to primary. They are also base on one teacher working 
independently of the rest of the teachers in the school For the 
bigger integrated model I had in mind the following:

Please excuse the world domination educator mode. :) 


Provision for group planning on a daily level.
In a fairly normal rural district, like mine for example with seven 
elementary campuses ranging to 20 miles between campuses, it 
impossible to have collaborative planning by grade level. What 
happens is that in the best case, the same planning is repeated in 
seven locations.  Worst case is it is repeated about 30 times for 
each grade level.  Having a centralized planning forum by grade level 
to synchronize planning would be a godsend. This could enhance the 
educational process by having access to submitted lesson planning by 
other teachers which would allow for each teacher to draw on the 
resources of all the teachers instead of having to come up with every 
lesson individually. Teachers could draw on expertise of others and 
allow for multi-level or multi-lingual implementations.


Integration of curriculum planning

With this type of database, curriculum planning would be a non-issue. 
Having the ability to look back and see which lessons had the best 
overall effect, choosing which to keep and which to abandon.

Communication with students, parents, and administration.

All the information would be available at different levels of access.
Administrators would be able to verify and evaluate lessons, student 
performance, overall goals. Parents and community could see what is 
going on in the school and participate to a greater level.Teachers 
could compare their strategies with others. Teachers could enter the 
grades and attendance in the database and all the administrative 
duplication could be automated. From grade reports to things such as 
printing out grade labels to post on cumulative records and report 
cards along with attendance reporting.

Districts could share resources and compare results.
OK, this is getting into the world domination.  One thing at a time :)

How I envision implementation

Basically it could be implemented with a core database using existing 
tools.  Not really any programming needed. It could be platform 
independent with a html interface. A basic webserver could be 
enhanced by other tools such as mailing lists, usenet and possible 
irc on separate networks. It would be scalable to the size of 
district or campus. An installation could be as small as one 
classroom computer or as large as a multi-server distributed database 
serving several districts in different areas of the world.

Ok, maybe I am reaching but if we are going to do it, why not plan 
for when we DO take over the world :)

David