Tom Hoffman
2009-01-29 16:48:33 UTC
One of the final "must haves" to make SchoolTool a basic student
information system is the ability to generate report cards. There are
many, many, many other kinds of reports that will be needed and added,
but aggregating end of marking period/semester/year scores to be sent
home to parents is the most prominent.
The plan is to mostly leverage the SchoolTool gradebook for this.
Basically, the site manager will create a special "reportsheet" that
will go in the gradebook for each section in a given term. The
teachers will fill out the report sheet when report cards are due, and
the report card report will pull the grades from these sheets. That's
the short description. We jerry-rigged something like this at SLA and
it worked fine.
The longer description:
The manager or school administrator goes to the year > the term >
report cards. He selects the "New Report Sheet" action. He gets a
form that lets him define columns for the report sheet. Title, id,
and score system being the important attributes. In a simple case,
this just might be "final" with an A-F score system, that is, the
report sheet will just collect a single A-F score for the final term
grade. If there are interim marking periods in the term, they could
have columns or they might get their own separate sheet. If the
report card has multiple descriptors, like "class participation,"
"effort," or whatever, those would be entered as separate columns. A
comment field is also an option.
The manager will submit this, and then in a separate step, he can
propagate it into the gradebook of each section in the term. At this
point, like many things in SchoolTool, you really don't want the
worksheets to be deleted or their structure changed -- this is perhaps
the most important data in the system, and you don't want to
accidentally lose it. OTOH, it has been our experience that people
make mistakes ;-). So ultimately we'll have to figure out how to hide
these or something for when people deploy them in error.
information system is the ability to generate report cards. There are
many, many, many other kinds of reports that will be needed and added,
but aggregating end of marking period/semester/year scores to be sent
home to parents is the most prominent.
The plan is to mostly leverage the SchoolTool gradebook for this.
Basically, the site manager will create a special "reportsheet" that
will go in the gradebook for each section in a given term. The
teachers will fill out the report sheet when report cards are due, and
the report card report will pull the grades from these sheets. That's
the short description. We jerry-rigged something like this at SLA and
it worked fine.
The longer description:
The manager or school administrator goes to the year > the term >
report cards. He selects the "New Report Sheet" action. He gets a
form that lets him define columns for the report sheet. Title, id,
and score system being the important attributes. In a simple case,
this just might be "final" with an A-F score system, that is, the
report sheet will just collect a single A-F score for the final term
grade. If there are interim marking periods in the term, they could
have columns or they might get their own separate sheet. If the
report card has multiple descriptors, like "class participation,"
"effort," or whatever, those would be entered as separate columns. A
comment field is also an option.
The manager will submit this, and then in a separate step, he can
propagate it into the gradebook of each section in the term. At this
point, like many things in SchoolTool, you really don't want the
worksheets to be deleted or their structure changed -- this is perhaps
the most important data in the system, and you don't want to
accidentally lose it. OTOH, it has been our experience that people
make mistakes ;-). So ultimately we'll have to figure out how to hide
these or something for when people deploy them in error.