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 However, SIMS incumbant in the majority of UK schools was an outdated clunker ten years ago and has a glacial product development record.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.
More later
