Tom Hoffman
2008-10-14 19:03:10 UTC
Last weekend the Arlington Career Center hosted the post-PloneConf
Plone sprint. SchoolTool took the opportunity to piggy-back a little
sprint on our gradebook.
We started by going through a specification document that the
Arlington Public Schools created to guide their upcoming selection of
a new gradebook. Jeff Elkner and David Welsh helped us prioritize
these, sorting requirement-laden index cards into piles.
Based on that process, Douglas Cerna, visiting from El Salvador, and
Alan Elkner worked on adding category weighting to the grade book,
e.g., tests are 30% of the grade, homework 20%, etc. They completed
the basic implementation, with just a few known edge cases remaining
to be cleaned up. Filip Sufitchi added Javascript hooks to the
gradebook view and implemented fill-down to enter the same grade in a
given column, while still having enough time to attend the Thomas
Jefferson High School homecoming dance.
Beyond coding, Jeff, David, Filip and did a phone interview with
education reporter Suzie Boss, which will hopefully result in some
well-deserved CanDo buzz. Jeff and I also met with the technology
director of the Arlington Education and Employment Program to discuss
uses for SchoolTool in adult ed programs. This is potentially a good
case for us if we could figure out how to get the funders of these
programs to see that putting open source administrative software in
the hands of their grantees would make their program evaluation much
more efficient. I also got to introduce Jeff to fellow travelers Brian
Jepson (Make) and Joan Peckham (URI/NSF) over dinner Saturday.
Overall, it was a very productive weekend.
--Tom
Plone sprint. SchoolTool took the opportunity to piggy-back a little
sprint on our gradebook.
We started by going through a specification document that the
Arlington Public Schools created to guide their upcoming selection of
a new gradebook. Jeff Elkner and David Welsh helped us prioritize
these, sorting requirement-laden index cards into piles.
Based on that process, Douglas Cerna, visiting from El Salvador, and
Alan Elkner worked on adding category weighting to the grade book,
e.g., tests are 30% of the grade, homework 20%, etc. They completed
the basic implementation, with just a few known edge cases remaining
to be cleaned up. Filip Sufitchi added Javascript hooks to the
gradebook view and implemented fill-down to enter the same grade in a
given column, while still having enough time to attend the Thomas
Jefferson High School homecoming dance.
Beyond coding, Jeff, David, Filip and did a phone interview with
education reporter Suzie Boss, which will hopefully result in some
well-deserved CanDo buzz. Jeff and I also met with the technology
director of the Arlington Education and Employment Program to discuss
uses for SchoolTool in adult ed programs. This is potentially a good
case for us if we could figure out how to get the funders of these
programs to see that putting open source administrative software in
the hands of their grantees would make their program evaluation much
more efficient. I also got to introduce Jeff to fellow travelers Brian
Jepson (Make) and Joan Peckham (URI/NSF) over dinner Saturday.
Overall, it was a very productive weekend.
--Tom