schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 7:02 AM, Phillip Tarrant <ptarrant@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>     The only problem with this is that we're in the middle of making
>>
>> several changes to the gradebook that will be in the next release.
>
>
> They are only entering in one class, they are still using the normal
> gradebook program also and they both expect that the grades can be "wiped
> out" or messed up as this is a "test" and "beta" they are doing their
> smallest classes (5 students in advanced math for example) so the data is
> never too hard to recreate. :)   we are also keeping "double copies" and
> using our old program for production, this is strickly a test system :P

Right, as long as your teachers don't completely judge us by the
current state of the release, and some of your feedback may be
slightly obsolete.

>> Yes.  That's a known bug.  I think we've fixed it already.
>
>  Glad the new person bug is fixed especially if i have to re-enter all this
> sometime :)

>> Hopefully you won't get many code errors.  In particular let us know
>> what "must have" features we're missing.
>
> you may have opened a can of worms on that one man... lol here is just day
> one.
>
> we all love the interface and are very excited about it. (our old gradebook
> was a glorified excel program...)
>
> <--~~**Features we like and don't wanna ever lose**~~-->
> *Sorting the gradebook per activity (nice to find lowest grades on an
> assignment)
> *Love the green "you haven't saved yet"
> *The "change timetable for one day" feature (very nice incase we swap
> periods around for stuff)

Yeah... make sure and check to see if the "change timetable for one
day" actually works the way you expect it to.

> <--~~**Features we expected but found missing**~~-->
> *Is it possible to have students auto-move to the next term?
>      this seems like quadruple the work since most students stay in the same
> classes per term (4x 9 weeks system)

I've got that as a "critical" bug at this point.

>      print report cards per student? (batch as well)

We're finishing planning the report card generation now.

> *Is it possible to add save worksheet templates?
>      this is something our old program did, we could save the "activities"
> as a template.
>      This saved alot of data entry at the beginning of the year since
> teachers normally teach the same things every year, using the same
> activities.

This would be a good idea to add to the list.

> *Is it possible for the gradebook to keep grades to the tenth place? (i.e.
> 97.4%)
>      our students are very competative, many of them are just a tenth of a
> point off from one honor vs another. we would like all "final"
> grades to be rounded to the tenth (or hundrenth would be cool too)

That shouldn't be a problem.  One big change which we're planning on
implementing is switching the gradebook to just use numbers and points
-- rather than allowing you to enter A-F, etc. for assignments.  We
aren't changing the underlying model, so we can work out a way to
accommodate other grading systems going forward (and we'll support
them for the report cards), but in particular we're baffled by what
the proper behavior would be in a gradebook where a teacher tried to
mix different grading systems (numbers, letters, etc).

> <--~~**Suggestions of things to add or change**~~-->
> *instead of "worksheet" could it say "gradesheet"

> *can we customize the values of the final grades? (per school / server
> setting)
>      i.e. we don't use a "D" grade here, just A,B,C,F

Yes, we'll probably need to do that sooner or later.  You can do it
relatively easily in code right now.

> *is it possible for teachers to assign their own students?
>      seems it would save our administration alot of work, and most teachers
> here are used to doing it

We could allow this to be set.  You're not the first to ask for it.  I
didn't think it was a very common use case, but perhaps I'm wrong.

> *can we "auto group" by grade level. (i.e. all 10th graders together)
> perhaps have a new field for graduation year?

Yes... we generally need stronger handling for grade levels.  We had
an over-engineered system for handling this, but haven't yet
implemented something more practical.

> *drop lowest grade button in the gradebook?
>      some teachers drop the lowest grade of students we are used to doing it
> by hand, and the "sort" feature makes it easy to find the      lowest per
> activity, but is it possible to either find the lowest grade per student for
> a class? and maybe have it auto-drop it?

We can add that to the list of things to do.

> <--~~**Bugs:**~~-->
> *Calendar:
>      it would appear either my timetable is WAY out of wack, or the calendar
> isn't showing it correctly
>      Our home room starts at 8am, however its on the bottom of my calendar
>      and for some reason all periods after that are above it on the calendar
> and reported as starting at 3am? (one example)

It is probably a timezone issue.  The user is probably set to prefer a
different timezone than the school.  I thought we've changed the
behavior to assume everyone is in the schools timezone, but perhaps it
isn't in the release yet.

> *I had some bugs earlier yesterday..server crash.
>      They where fixed by a "reinstall" on top of itselft, i think it was a
> permissions issue.
>
> *Host =
>      getting the host = 0.0.0.0 setting to work was iffy at times.
>      at first i tried host = 0.0.0.0  no one could access it after a reboot
>      i then tried removing the line... this worked great after a
> reboot...but around 3 hours later it crashed?
>      added the line back in...host = 0.0.0.0 and all worked great after a
> reboot

Hm... this is with the Ubuntu packages?

--Tom