On Sun, Oct 06, 2002 at 08:43:54PM -0500, Jay Kline wrote: > On Sunday 06 October 2002 5:05 pm, Tim Wilson wrote: > > > > Unfortunately no. I try to stay pretty close to the Linux in education > > news and I have yet to find a gradebook application that has the > > features of any decent commercial product for Win32 or MacOS. > > Just out of curiosity.. what are the specifiations of a "reasonably complete > set of features" needed in a gradebook application? I might be looking for an > internship/senior project soon, and depending on the difficulty of such a > task, I (or others in the program) might be willing to take on something like > this. The biggest issue for me is not knowing what features get used or are > needed. Hi Jay, Here are some things off the top of my head. If you do some googling you'll probably find other, more complete descriptions of the requirements. 1. Support different systems of calculating grades such as "total points" where your grade is simply an average of all points earned during the term and "weighted grades" where the overall grade is some weighted average of homework, quizzes, exams, etc. Of course, the categories will need to be flexible since different teachers approach the categories differently. 2. Flexible reporting that allows, for example, individual student reports, class reports that show student names, class reports without names, etc. 3. Options on a per assignment basis that would allow a particular student to be excused from a particular assignment with no penalty, custom grading scales for individual students who may have some special needs, etc. 4. Integration with larger student databases. This is the thing that probably kills most open source grading efforts. There are a host of "standards" out there that define how grade book programs can deliver student grades to larger student databases (such as the TSIS system that TIES uses). Integration is huge these days. Many schools have very integrated systems that include grading, attendance, discipline, grading, scheduling, budgeting, etc. Here are some potentially useful links: SEUL/edu (http://www.seul.org/edu/) The SEUL/edu administrative application index (http://richtech.ca/cgi-bin/seul/seulvw.pl?category=Administrative) Schoolforge (http://schoolforge.net/) > My High School used TIES for a lot of things, one of the things I think it > provided was the abilitiy to tie multiple gradebooks together for a school > (ie- submitting grades). Is this, in general, a desiarable feature? Another thing that's a popular idea these days is providing a way for parents and students to access a grade report through the Web. There are a host of security considerations obviously, but it's a pretty popular idea among parents in particular. Anyone interest in open source in K-12 education should probably join the schoolforge mailing list and check it out. -Tim -- Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out: Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.org | http://www.zope.com W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org wilson at visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com