schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

We're getting ready for a new round of SchoolTool releases next Thursday.

The big news will be the first public release of CanDo, a competency
tracking component for SchoolTool originally developed by and for
Career and Technical Education in the state of Virginia, and
re-written by the SchoolTool team this year to take advantage of the
new SchoolTool design and gradebook improvements, and also to be much
more generally useful outside of Virginia.  So if you need to do any
sort of outcomes-based, standards-based, competency-based or some
other similar kind of assessment, you'll be able to start doing that
within SchoolTool.

Even though this is new to the general public, CanDo immediately
becomes the most complete, well tested and heavily used part of
SchoolTool.  In addition to the Career and Technical Centers across
Virginia, SchoolTool and CanDo will also be used this year by the
international Fab Academy program, by the Alexandria Shipyard program
across the US, and for social skills tracking with special education
students in Arlington, Virginia.

We will also be releasing SchoolTool 2.3.  This is not a big feature
release, as most of the heavy feature work went into CanDo and some
other changes that won't appear until SchoolTool 2.4.  Essentially, it
is a repackaging of the sequence of fixes that have gone into our
recent development releases, documented here:
http://book.schooltool.org/2.2-release-notes.html  The biggest changes
are a new gradebook/journal grid that is faster and supports large
number of sheets, and improved XLS import/export.  We have also worked
on improving LDAP integration, particularly with the Zentyal server
distribution.

SchoolTool 2.3 and CanDo will NOT be included in the Ubuntu Universe
repositories for Precise and Quantal.  You will have to add our
development package archive off Launchpad to get these releases.

Following these releases, we are going to focus the core team (me and
three developers) on updating the design of the existing printed
reports and adding more across the application (gradebook, CanDo,
attendance, etc.) for about a month.  We'll release this work as an
update to 2.3.

We will then work on completing some already in progress changes for
2.4, making sure we have plenty of time to settle the updates into the
Ubuntu repositories for their 13.04 release.  The big change in this
release will be the inclusion of a distributed task queue (celery) and
other plumbing necessary to run scheduled or long-running tasks like
big imports and reports asynchronously so your browser isn't stuck
waiting for a very long request.

Expect more details next week!

Tom Hoffman
SchoolTool Project Manager