Tom Hoffman
2009-02-10 14:44:50 UTC
We held a three day sprint at the Arlington Career Center last
weekend, Feb. 6-8. In attendance were Ignas Mikalaj?nas, Alan Elkner,
Douglas Cerna, Filip Sufitchi, Chris Carey, Jason Straw, Matt
Gallagher, Jeff Elkner and Tom Hoffman. These events are getting
pretty routine (in a good way). Everyone knows the application and
sprint processes very well, and we're able to get right down to work
and keep rolling straight through the weekend. The only snafu was a
rather comprehensive failure of the school district's network Saturday
night. We ended up relocating to the Straw family dining room, and we
all appreciate Jason and his family's hospitality and tolerance.
We hit our major development goals:
Flexible Demographics -- Ignas, Filip and Alan implemented a new
demographics system that is customizable through the web by a site
administrator. This is what everyone wanted all along, but I didn't
want to promise it for 1.0. Turns out that if you're going to allow
any customizability at all, it is just as easy to go all the way. The
biggest headache is what to do when a user decides to edit an existing
schema. Basically we're leveraging our spreadsheet import/export, so
the workflow will be: export your existing data > change the
demographic attributes in SchoolTool > rejigger the columns in your
exported spreadsheet to match what's now in SchoolTool > reimport your
rejiggered data.
Contacts -- Contact information (i.e., parent address, phone, etc) is
now stored as separate objects from the student, so you can have
multiple parents, etc. per student (Ignas).
External Activities -- Douglas finished his work for Jeff on
connecting CanDo to the SchoolTool gradebook. You can now pull
activity scores from CanDo into SchoolTool.
Gradebook Simplification -- We spent a while discussing the
nonsensical math of grading systems. For example, if a student has
three scores, an "A," a "87" and a "Pass," what's the average? We
decided to limit the 1.0 version of the gradebook to numerical scores
to keep it transparent and predictable for everyone. Alan implemented
this change.
UI -- Chris Carey made SchoolTool gradebook use consistent colors via
CSS when they do score validity checking. He also added the timetable
ID to the timetable view (needed for section imports).
Section Resource Booking -- Chris added basic support for reserving a
resource to every meeting of a section.
Documentation. Tom and Jason re-organized the SchoolTool Book. Tom
created an annotated import spreadsheet.
--Tom
weekend, Feb. 6-8. In attendance were Ignas Mikalaj?nas, Alan Elkner,
Douglas Cerna, Filip Sufitchi, Chris Carey, Jason Straw, Matt
Gallagher, Jeff Elkner and Tom Hoffman. These events are getting
pretty routine (in a good way). Everyone knows the application and
sprint processes very well, and we're able to get right down to work
and keep rolling straight through the weekend. The only snafu was a
rather comprehensive failure of the school district's network Saturday
night. We ended up relocating to the Straw family dining room, and we
all appreciate Jason and his family's hospitality and tolerance.
We hit our major development goals:
Flexible Demographics -- Ignas, Filip and Alan implemented a new
demographics system that is customizable through the web by a site
administrator. This is what everyone wanted all along, but I didn't
want to promise it for 1.0. Turns out that if you're going to allow
any customizability at all, it is just as easy to go all the way. The
biggest headache is what to do when a user decides to edit an existing
schema. Basically we're leveraging our spreadsheet import/export, so
the workflow will be: export your existing data > change the
demographic attributes in SchoolTool > rejigger the columns in your
exported spreadsheet to match what's now in SchoolTool > reimport your
rejiggered data.
Contacts -- Contact information (i.e., parent address, phone, etc) is
now stored as separate objects from the student, so you can have
multiple parents, etc. per student (Ignas).
External Activities -- Douglas finished his work for Jeff on
connecting CanDo to the SchoolTool gradebook. You can now pull
activity scores from CanDo into SchoolTool.
Gradebook Simplification -- We spent a while discussing the
nonsensical math of grading systems. For example, if a student has
three scores, an "A," a "87" and a "Pass," what's the average? We
decided to limit the 1.0 version of the gradebook to numerical scores
to keep it transparent and predictable for everyone. Alan implemented
this change.
UI -- Chris Carey made SchoolTool gradebook use consistent colors via
CSS when they do score validity checking. He also added the timetable
ID to the timetable view (needed for section imports).
Section Resource Booking -- Chris added basic support for reserving a
resource to every meeting of a section.
Documentation. Tom and Jason re-organized the SchoolTool Book. Tom
created an annotated import spreadsheet.
--Tom