schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Jen Overgaag <jovergaag@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 3:15 AM, Jen Overgaag <jovergaag@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >> 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.
> >
> > [JO]  From what I've seen FET does not deal with individual students.  It
> > only manages the groups and subgroups and will never ask you to enter the
> > names of individual students.
>
> So presumably you can provide the membership of the subgroups in a
> separate format?
>

[JO] I was hoping we could do that when importing the names of the students
into ST.  However, I just did a mass import yesterday on our existing system
and realized that there isn't a field on the import spreadsheet for group.
Is there a way to specify the group when importing XLS?

>
> >> 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.
> >
> > [JO]Assuming SchoolTool will continue to only support calendaring and not
> > timetable generation we will need to continue with FET.  The timetable
> > changes drastically every term and there are minor changes every couple
> of
> > weeks (due to the high staff turnover).  I had it in my mind that we
> would
> > create a new timetable using FET every term, import, then just make the
> > minor adjustments as teachers come and go within the Schooltool calendar.
>
> I'm a little confused about terms.  If the schedule changes
> dramatically at predictable points in the year, we should probably
> define these changes in SchoolTool as changes in term, even if we
> don't report them as such on report cards, etc.
>

[JO] Unfortunately the dramatic changes aren't at predictable points.  A
staff member can leave at any time, beginning/middle/end of the term.  For
the most part they will just spread that teacher's classes over the existing
staff's schedule but there are times when the whole timetable has to be
reworked.

>
> And yes, we'll have to come up with a sane workflow for doing this
> again next term/year without creating duplicate or otherwise
> inconsistent data.  It is actually probably easier than I thought,
> since importing from FET won't need to create new persons itself.
>
> --Tom
>