schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 7:49 PM, Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Pick the scenario where the school management is mostly on sections or
> courses, the clerk would frequently need to check what sections /
> courses a certain student is participating or participated, or plan to
> participate. There is no straighforeward way to do so now (I hope
> I am wrong!).

This should appear under "Courses" (really should be "Sections,") on
the main page for a person.  You can get there via Manage > Persons,
and also it is linked directly in different parts of the interface.

We will probably change this slightly soon, because it ends up being a
little bit of a security hassle because we'd like to have slightly
looser permissions on a person's basic info (a person by this name
exists...) but at least be able to limit who can see their section
enrollments more strictly.  For example, in US schools, a "special
education" student's status is considered confidential, so the fact
that they are enrolled in a "special education" might be limited to a
relatively small sub-set of teachers and administrators.

Anyhow... all that being said, in the current version it should be
right there on the person's page.

> 3 improvements can be done to make the clerk to be able to do her job.
>
> First calendar approach. The clerk can click a student and check his
> calendar, drill down the calendar to figure out the list of courses he
> took. But she doesn't find what sections he is in. Perhaps the
> minimal-change solution is to display section name along course name
> in the student's calendar.  It is not very convenient thanks to the
> steps needed to get the result.

One perennial question is: how should sections be identified?  What
information is most relevant depends on the point of view of the
reader -- for example, the name of the teacher and subject may be very
relevant to everyone other than the teacher, but for the teacher,
seeing five sections labeled "Hoffman - English 9, Fall 2010" is not
helpful.  The teacher would rather just see "8:30," "9:30," etc.

Any thoughts on this?

> Second method is to produce list of sections of students. It can
> either be a single big report table of sections by students covering
> all students, or, one list of sections per student, on each student's
> profile page. The former is more convenient for clerks while the
> latter can include students as the users.
>
>
> Third, a roster table of all lessons of a student (instead the existing table of all students of a lesson) can help.

Overall, more reports like the above would probably be helpful (and necessary).

--Tom