[school-discuss] sigue 1.01: a program to track progress of students and generate reports

[Vladimir Tamara <vtamara@informatik.uni-kl.de>]

sigue is composed of tools and XML formats that allow users to track 
progress of students in one or more subjects during several periods
and to generate reports periodically in several formats. 
It is highly configurable (e.g it includes its own interpreter to 
calculate averages). It can be used simoultaniosly by several teachers,
CVS can also be used.
In particular it has been used succesfully with the current colombian 
legislation about grades and it has been used since 2002 in a colombian 
school.  For the colombian case it includes an interface in PHP to 
facilitate the grading process (for teachers), and scripts to print 
reports for parents in LaTeX. 

The sources of sigue and its documentaion are in the public domain
(documentation and interface up to now in spanish):

http://structio.sourceforge.net/sigue

Te generation of reports is not the fastest.  I must admit influence of the 
idea of EduML. There should be several things to enhance to make it usable 
to track grades in other countries, but at least now it works in one country. 
It has been hard to use XML, there are a few uses of XSLT but the majority of 
the transformations is achieved with programs in Ocaml (With XML 1.0 
I couldn't work simoultanously several XML documents with different DTDs,
for example to reference an ID of one from the other, with XSLT 1.0 
some operations are too difficult, seems that for-each-group of XSLT 2.0 
solves some issues but libxslt supports XSLT 1.0. Ideas?).