schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Alan Elkner <aelkner@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

Having not heard from Dave this week, I want to assume that no news is
good news on the cando front.  Am I right in being so optimistic?

Anyway, I have been doing an analysis of the FET system and the
various files you sent us, and I'd like to summarize my findings and
ask some questions.  First of all, I noticed that although FET
expresses the various concepts like groups and subgroups differently
than schooltool does, I see a predictable and reliable mapping between
the two, and it will be no problem to write import scripts to get your
data into schooltool (I've already begun this work).  The only FET
feature that schooltool does not support is groups (we call them
terms) that overlap years.  I don't believe that you need this
feature.  Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing that a
single year term would work for you.

The question of student enrollment into classes seems to be addressed
in FET by aligning students into what they call subgroups  (we would
use schooltool groups for this) and enrolling the entire subgroup into
a set schedule of classes.  That assumes that students will always
enroll in classes together in this predictable manner which schooltool
can support but does not require.  The one thing that I didn't notice
in the set of xml files that you sent us is the actual membership of
any student in any of these subgroups.  Could you please send us an
xml file example of a list of actual student names and their
membership in one of these subgroups?  That will allow me to create an
import of the actual students into schooltool and the classes they
belong to.

Reading your FeatureDetails document, I can see that you will be glad
to take advantage of schooltool's groups for not only class
enrollment, but also things like club membership and sports teams and
the like.  It's convenient that schooltool offers this group feature
independent of class enrollment, and you can feel free to have
teachers and students belong to any arbitrary number of independent
groups.  Any connection between a student's membership in a group such
as '8b' in schooltool and their enrollment in the set of classes that
students in '8b' attend is purely arbitrary from schooltool's point of
view, and as I said before, we can support making that connection.

You mentioned using groups for grade levels as well, and a subgroup
such as '8b' suggests to me grade level 8, subsection b.  Although you
wouldn't have found documentation for grade levels in schooltool, we
will have support for them in the custom schooltool package that we
will be making for you.  Eventually, that support will end up in
schooltool core, but you will be amongst the first users of that
feature in your custom package.

One last question for now: are you intending to move all your FET data
into schooltool as a one-time thing, and then use schooltool from then
on, or do you intend to use both together for the years ahead?  My
analysis leads to the conclusion that you wouldn't need FET anymore,
but I could have missed something.  Please advise.

Thanks,
Alan