[schooltool-dev] Configuration issues for schools

[Tom Hoffman]

On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Tim Holy <tim.holy at gmail.com> wrote:

> However, I personally see numerous advantages in having SchoolTool and
> TuxMath interact primarily via the filesystem:
> 1. We need a place to put data anyway---why not just make it a
> mutually-agreed upon set of directories?
> 2. TuxMath and most other educational software already has the ability to
> read files, but few can parse XML.
> That said, it's not like I'd rule out the use of XML if there were a
> compelling reason, and see below for some possible candidates.

Well, we've started just importing and exporting everything from
spreadsheets, because that's what school secretaries and teachers know
anyhow, so perhaps that would be best of all.

> My main thoughts for possible roles for SchoolTool (or any other management
> software) would be:
> 1. Easy configuration. You already have all the sudents and teachers
> assigned to grades/classrooms (right?), and so we should use that
> information to inform TuxMath and other software about these relationships.
> Currently, our "tuxmathadmin" program creates the directory hierarchy I
> described from a comma-separated-value (CSV) file; if nothing else,
> SchoolTool could save the appropriate data to the CSV file and run
> tuxmathadmin. There are additional issues about adding/deleting/moving
> students, but those would be pretty trivial to solve.
> That works for TuxMath, but part of my interest in this discussion is to see
> if other educational software would be interested in making use of the same
> directory hierarchy (there has been some cautious interest from GCompris).
> If so, we should try to come up with reasonable standards.

I'm sure we could dump out whatever you need easily enough.

> 2. A more sophisticated and frequent task would be reporting. Currently,
> tuxmath saves data about how students do on the lessons. But we don't yet
> have a GUI yet for visualizing that data. Is that something that we should
> write as a standalone program (and we are considering doing so), or is that
> the kind of thing that might be a module in SchoolTool or other program? I
> can see advantages either way. What are your thoughts?

This is the part where it would be genuinely advantageous to work
directly with SchoolTool.  We could work out a way to just get scores
into a SchoolTool gradebook worksheet and then leverage all the other
machinery and reports around grading we have (or are working on...).

--Tom