[schooltool-dev] feature list

[Tom Hoffman]

Here's the big long description of what SchoolTool beta does.
Feedback appreciated.  It is meant to be long...

I'll be adding some images and putting this in the intrepid version of
the SchoolTool Book.

--Tom

Overview of Features
====================

Basic Use Cases
---------------

SchoolTool is configured by default to act as what is often called a
"student information system" or SIS.  The focus is on tracking
information related to students.  It is a subset of a complete
"management information system" or MIS for schools, which might also
cover systems like accounting.

SchoolTool is not a "learning managment system," or LMS, such as
Moodle, although they share some overlapping components, such as a
gradebook.  SchoolTool does not contain curriculum or learning
objects.  One way to differentiate between SIS and LMS roles is note
that LMS's don't print student report cards, while SIS's do.  SIS data
focuses on students; the LMS is organized around courses.

SchoolTool is designed for extensibility, however, so we hope that in
collaboration with outside users, governments and vendors SchoolTool
will offer more functionality beyond basic SIS components in the
future.

Because SchoolTool is free and easy to install, it can also
practically be deployed and used within a school by a small subset of
teachers, or even installed on a laptop or desktop PC and used by a
single teacher as an online gradebook or attendance journal.
Likewise, schools can use individual components of SchoolTool, such as
resource booking, without committing to using it as a complete student
information system.

Currently, the primary use case for SchoolTool is for one server
instance corresponding to one school.  You can handle multiple schools
by running multiple server processes (software) on one physical server
(hardware).  Managing multiple schools efficiently is a long-term goal
for SchoolTool.  It is possible in some cases to track specific data
about several similar schools on one SchoolTool instance.

School Model
------------

* Persons: Default roles for people are students, teachers, school
administrators, and site administrators (technical).  Parent access is
planned for future releases.  People can be imported and exported from
text files.  By design all people can log in, but currently our
development focus has been on teacher and administrator views.  If
people are not assigned passwords, they cannot log in.

* Groups: Create arbitrary groups of people representing school
organizations, clubs, teams, etc.  Group rosters can be imported from
text files.

* Courses and sections: Courses define blocks of curriculum; e.g., 1st
grade Math, 9th grade English.  Sections are the groupings of teachers
and students working on a course; e.g., Mr. Hoffman's 9:30 Algebra I
class, Fall 2009 semester.  Courses and sections can be imported from
text files.

* Years and terms: Years are the longest block of time in SchoolTool.
The transition between years represents a regular point of significant
reorganization within the school; e.g., when most students are
promoted, teachers hired, etc.).  Terms define when sections begin and
end.

* Timetables: Timetables define when sections meet during the week.
This is the school's "bell schedule."  SchoolTool handles simple
timetables; e.g., classes meet the same time every day; and many
complex ones, such as rotating schedules and schedules with different
start and end times on different days of the week.  SchoolTool does
not currently generate class rosters or automatically schedule
sections into rooms and times.  It tracks the timetables you enter or
import.

* Resources: SchoolTool allows you to manage and track shared
resources.  These are divided into "locations" and "resources," with
further user-created types such as "classrooms" or "projectors."  Each
has additional meta-data, such as the seating capacity of a location.
Resources can be imported from a text file.

Demographics
------------

SchoolTool 2008.10 has a simple implementation of demographics,
tracking the following data: first name, last name, gender, email,
phone, birth date and advisor.  Based on user feedback, we will add to
this to create a more complete default schema for SchoolTool 2009.04.
We will also help local developers create custom demographic schemas.

In the long run we hope to support end-user customizable demographic fields.

Calendaring
-----------

* SchoolTool automatically creates a web-based calendar for every
person, group, resource, and section.  There is also a school-wide
calendar that can be displayed on the front page of SchoolTool.

* Person calendars are private.  By default, group and section
calendars are visible only to members.

* Like iCal, Google Calendar, and other popular calendaring
applications, SchoolTool allows users to "overlay" events from other
calendars on their personal calendar.  For example, by default, a
student sees events from all sections they are enrolled in and the
school-wide calendar.

* Calendars are aware of the school timetable, so by default new
events will start and end at the beginning and end of class periods.

* Users can create single or repeating events.  Teachers can edit
section events to note tests, assignment and other class information.

* Calendars can be imported and exported to other popular applications
like iCal and Google Calendar using the iCal (.ics) format.

Resource Booking
----------------

Teachers, administrators and managers can schedule shared resources
via their calendar.  This component is fairly mature and stable; some
schools may use SchoolTool for this functionality alone.

How it works:

* A teacher, administrator or manager selects and existing calendar
event or creates a new one.

* He or she can then select the type of resource he needs; SchoolTool
returns a list of the resources of that type which are available or
already booked.

* The user can then add an available resource to the event; an event
at the same time is added to the resource's calendar.

Users can monitor or print the schedule for each resource by viewing
its calendar.

Attendance and Participation Journal
------------------------------------

SchoolTool provides a simple attendance and participation journal for
each section which allows a teacher to track absences and tardies, and
optionally assign each student a numeric score for each class meeting.
 Each meeting of a section can also be assigned a description.  The
teacher can add a cumulative attendance/participation grade for the
term.

Individual entries in the journal grid are stored to the server
without requiring a page reload using Ajax.  The journal displays
average participation scores and total absences for the term.

The current system is adequate for teacher record keeping and
providing basic data for report cards.  We have not implemented a full
workflow to manage excused and unexcused absences for a school with
strict legal requirements, such as US public schools.  We will focus
on improving the user experience and reports for this simpler case
first.

The attendance journal was created in collaboration with faculty from
the Vilnius Lyceum in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Gradebook
---------

SchoolTool includes a basic assignment-oriented gradebook for each
section.  Each section can have multiple spreadsheet worksheets.
Teachers create assignments (or "activities") that are organized and
may be weighted by category, such as "exam" or "presentation."  Grades
can be assigned by a variety of systems, including point values and
letter grades.  Additional scoring systems can be added in code;
suggestions are welcome.

The gradebook is fairly complete in functionality, but still rough
around the edges, and gradebooks are imfamously full of edge cases.
Beta testing is strongly encouraged!  Let us know what needs fixing.

Reporting
---------

SchoolTool's printed reports are generated using the free and powerful
ReportLab library.  Now that SchoolTool can capture a variety of data
for a school, we need your feedback on exactly what kind of reports
are needed at your school.  Creating a set of high quality printable
and web-viewable reports is a priority for development.  Let us know
what you need!

Interoperability Between SchoolTool Components
----------------------------------------------

SchoolTool 2008.10.1 does not support some rather obvious kinds of
interaction between components, such as displaying the attendance
journal grade in the gradebook, or adding gradebook assignments to
student calendars.  We will be working on adding "low hanging fruit"
like this to the 2009.4 release.

Additional Components Under Development
---------------------------------------

There are two additional SchoolTool components being tested at two US
high schools.  Each is a powerful and compelling application in its
own right, and an example of the kind of user-driven extensions we
hope to see as part of a growing SchoolTool ecosystem.  We hope to
have them packaged for general use with SchoolTool in 2009.

* CanDo is a full-featured competency tracking system developed
primarily by students in and around Arlington, Virginia for use
initially at the Arlington Career Center.  It has been under
development in various iterations for almost five years; the current
SchoolTool-based version is cleanly integrated into SchoolTool and
running stably with a production installation tracking 8000 students.
CanDo development has been funded by the Arlington School District,
State of Virginia, and Mark Shuttleworth.

* At Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we have
developed a student intervention tracking system.  This provides a
workflow for managing a set of goals for a student, coordinating the
process between relevant stakeholders.

Technical
---------

* 100% free and open source software stack:
  - Python programming language;
  - Zope 3 component architecture;
  - Zope Object Database (ZODB);
  - ReportLab PDF generation.

* Security: Our custom security model manages permissions based both
on role (e.g., teacher, school adminitrator) and relationships (e.g.,
between a specific teacher and student).  Basic customization of some
key aspects of the security policy can be done through the web by the
site manager.  Complete customization is possible through XML
configuration files.

* Test-driven development: SchoolTool includes a comprehensive test
suite, including unit and functional tests.  Python "doctests" double
as narrative developer documentation.

* Installation and upgrades: are managed via the Ubuntu packaging
system and Launchpad.net.  Two step production server deployment on
Ubuntu Linux.  One-step bugfix upgrades within SchoolTool release
versions.  Major releases synchronized to Ubunutu releases.

* Internationalization: SchoolTool is completely translatable.  New
translations can be contributed via the Rosetta system on
Launchpad.net.

* Single-sign on: SchoolTool includes somewhat unpolished
implementation of the Central Authentication Service (CAS) for single
sign on with other enterprise applications such as Moodle and Drupal.
CAS requires a separate authentication server; we have been using
RubyCAS in this role at a test site.  The CAS server can be easily
configured to authenticate against your LDAP server or another
external database.

* Web server: SchoolTool contains its own server for easy testing and
simple deployments.  For sites requiring a encrypted (SSL) connection,
we recommend using Apache as a secure proxy.

* Virtual servers: For schools in a predominantly Windows or other
non-Ubuntu environment, we recommend running SchoolTool on a dedicated
virtual server, running Ubuntu Server Edition JeOS.  Regardless of the
host operating system, running SchoolTool on its own virtual server
isolated from other services is a good security precaution.

* Developer tools: "devmode" provides object introspection and API
documentation via the SchoolTool web interface.

* Sample data: To aid in testing SchoolTool, we provide tools for
generating sample data for two years in a school of 1000 students
(NOTE: this is temporarily disabled in SchoolTool 2008.10.0).

* Consistent programming style: For readibility and easier
modification, SchoolTool conforms to the official PEP 8 Style Guide
for Python Code.