Re: [seul-edu] Open Admin for Schools Feedback/Question

[owner-seul-edu@seul.org (Nobody)]

Dear Les,
I think 3 and 4 are probably enough. Those who want more probably 
want a way to send progress reports of some kind, not full-fledged 
report cards -- don't you think? That's my guess.
I had quite a time getting a principal to consider trying your 
system and it turns out it had nothing to do with the system. In 
fact he didn't look at it until the last moment (after more than a 
week of moaning) despite having received the URL's. It seems that 
having the last word is more important than having a viewpoint based 
on information. The system he wanted us to buy would a) have hooked 
us into wintel again and b) cost a pretty penny. Why? Because his 
friends were using it at other schools. So much for having a reason 
for the season.
Anyway, we're in now. I'm sorry I haven't been able to get to know 
your system more yet, but I'm going with it and the school head 
thinks it will do the trick, so that's a heavy vote in your favor. 
Many, many thanks for all the work.
What's your time frame and what are you hoping to come out with re 
the report cards? We're hoping to try them out for our Child Center 
(preschool), Primary, Middle and High schools in December.
Best wishes,
David Quoting Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>:
> Hi All,  I'm wrapping my head around the problem of creating report 
> cards for the Open Admin system. I'm trying to create a system that 
> is quite general in scope and relatively easily customized. There 
> is a trade off since trying to be all things to all people will 
> generally fail and it might be better to create simpler code that 
> is easier to customize for specific needs, rather than create 
> gigantic code to cover all possible cases.  This leads to my 
> question:  How many "terms" or sections of a school year throughout 
> the world in schools of users on this list?  I'm planning for 
> either 3 or 4 terms per school year. Are there others? (ie. a lot 
> of others?)  Since this system reports on attendance as part of the 
> report card, I have to slice the school year up into terms, 
> calculate the number of school days per term, and then check this 
> against student records to generate stats. However this leads to 
> the problem of how many terms to allow for in laying out the report 
> in a table format 
> since normally one wants to go across:  Attendance   Term 1    Term 
> 2    Term 3, etc. How far to go....   This is also a problem for 
> reporting subjects since we again would like to go across the page 
> with the different term values:  Science   Term 1   Term 2    Term 
> 3  and different numbers of terms require different table layouts.  
> I was going to stick with options for 3 or 4, but what are the 
> needs?   Les Richardson H. Hardcastle School Edam, Sk. Canada


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