Came across this post again today and I wanted to make sure I recorded it here on my blog. Its one of those stories that stayed in my head. This was the quote that got me
I went to a school where on my first day I walked into the games hall to watch a sixth year boy, wearing a GB vest, slotting baskets from the sideline one after another. He was a legend in the school and was playing for the senior men’s GB team whilst still at school. In the rest of the games hall there seemed to be hundreds of other kids of all ages playing games, dribbling, making shots and having a great time – yet there wasn’t a teacher in sight!
However , I was interested to know why they chose dance in their school as a major sport for boys considering that Don was a rugby player.
I always enjoy Don’s Blog – especially during the holidays when I get time to catch up on my reading.
We’ve been discussing our assessment tracking requirements at school – excel spreadsheets versus various database solutions always the same old problems the trade off between flexibility, usability, reliability and accessibility for different parties.
It would be great to do the task in SIMS our School Information System (SIS). However, SIMS incumbant in the majority of UK schools was an outdated clunker ten years ago and has a glacial product development record.
Even if anyone had the expertise or the required permissions in school to try and use SIMS for the job, the lack of deep linking, copy and paste and rss make it a miserable task. And as for finding any online help forums – forget it. For me SIMS turns the db mantra “write once, read anywhere” into “write into SIMS, never see it again”. At least not until a few weeks later when a deputy head thrusts a printout in front of you and starts asking questions.
So the classic question arose again in my mind. Isn’t there an open source alternative yet? So today I allowed myself 15mins to sketch a few requirements down (so I could judge if a solution was maturing or not), then set about looking for a development effort.
It seems that SchoolTool.org is the only credible option. I do remember reading about it before but that must have been over 3 years ago. Interestingly Tom Hoffman the project manager in this paper offers some explanation of why an open source success in this area has been so slow to develop ( I would add that many innovative teachers have anti-assessment tendencies.) But it seems that SchoolTool is getting to the stage where some adventurous schools (or even individual teachers) might want to be trying it. In other words they are nearly at version 1.
I’m installing it now on my Linux machine.
This documentation seems incredibly well written but difficult to navigate, in fact I found the whole website a bit confusing. I nearly gave up because at one stage it seemed that development had stopped a year ago (not true). Development has been fragmented it seems in different sites in USA, Belgium and Lithuania. And it seems that there are different parts School Bell and Can Do (assessment) that can confuse the casual observer.
It would be nice to have the user forums (actually mailing lists archives) to be more obvious too. Also as a self taught asp/php sql coder I have no idea if their none LAMP choice of ZOPE is a good one or not.
I’ve mentioned Helena Norberg Hodge’s Book Ancient Futures before but I’ve just found the video that was made a few years after the book on Youtube. Well worth 23mins (in 3 parts).
I found both the book and video to be an amazing summary of the effects of globalisation on an indigenous people – perhaps due to the perceptiveness of the ladakhi people – I spent a long time in the mountains in Venezuela but the people don’t have the same perspective.
Less convincing however, were the solutions that she offers in the second half of the book. Although that would be expected. Indentifying the problem clearly is a good start.
An entertaining and thought provoking talk by Ken Robinson. I have his book “The Element” if anyone at school wants to borrow it.
Whilst I support wholeheartedly moving to a more creative and project based curriculum I do have a problem with people who seem to be saying lets have no structured learning and no assessment. It is one thing to identify the desired destination it is another to work out how to get there.
I hope to post more on this later during the Easter holidays.
Posted by richard 
