As a new school year approaches in much of the world, I'd like to take a moment to point out that while we generally promote SchoolTool as a free, open source student information system for schools, it can also be much *less* than that, depending on your needs.

That is, since SchoolTool is free and easy to install, particularly using modern virtual servers, you can use SchoolTool to solve specific problems without facing the much larger issue of migrating your whole school to a new information system.

Collect Assessment Data

Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia uses SchoolTool to create and print regular interim reports on all students. SchoolTool's new Report Sheet feature facilitates collection of grades, test scores, comments or other custom data from teachers at regular intervals. Stop emailing spreadsheets!

Track Grades and Attendance

Jeff Elkner of the Arlington Career Center in Arlington, Virginia, uses SchoolTool as his personal gradebook. Anyone using Ubuntu Linux on their desktop or laptop (or server in the "cloud") can easily install and use SchoolTool as their online gradebook and attendance journal. Schools can offer SchoolTool as a free alternative to teachers wishing to move their bookkeeping online.

Schedule Resources Online

The Paul Cuffee School in Providence, RI uses SchoolTool to coordinate the use of their computer labs and laptop carts. Teachers can check what resources are available via SchoolTool's calendar and place reservations online.

SchoolTool is at a point where a small community of individual users and schools implementing some of the above features will do a great deal to keep the project moving forward, and we have developer resources to assist and respond to bug and feature requests, so please have a look and let us know what you think.

Got word from Linux Ink that they're going to include SchoolTool RPM packages (for testing as a "technology preview") in the next version of Nau Linux, which is used in schools and academia in Russia. Not only does this help us cross over to Russian schools, perhaps more importantly it will take us a big step back across the bridge to the Red Hat sphere of influence.

Justas Sadzevičius and Alan Elkner did the bulk of the work below, with Alan focusing on the gradebook, and Douglas Cerna's volunteer contributions as noted.

If you install SchoolTool, you'll get the current version, and if you've already got it installed, <code>sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade</code> or just wait for Ubuntu's standard system update to kick in.

Justas Sadzevičius:

• SchoolTool no longer supports groups as members of a section. To add all members of a group, please use the filter in section's "edit individuals" page. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/schooltool/+bug/370629
• Optional "Course ID", "Goverment ID" and "Credits" fields added to a Course. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/schooltool/+bug/381031

Gediminas Paulauskas:

• Fixed broken packages. See: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/schooltool/+bug/352096
• Server properly starts after installation or upgrade. See: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/schooltool/+bug/334365

2009.04.12

SchoolTool includes customizable student demographics, parent/contact management, attendance, gradebook, calendaring, resource booking and report card generation.  SchoolTool can be used in a wide variety of contexts.  An individual teacher can run a personal gradebook on their desktop or laptop computer.  Individual schools can use SchoolTool as his or her primary student information system or a complement to other systems.  SchoolTool is also scalable to multi-school deployments, as the Commonwealth of Virginia (US) is piloting at eight career and technical academies. 

Schools, service providers, government agencies, vendors, hackers and other interested parties are invited to test, use, deploy and offer feedback on SchoolTool in coming months.  Development of SchoolTool will continue at a brisk pace in preparation for deployments in the 2009-2010 school year. 

SchoolTool is 100% free and open source software, built with the Python programming language and Zope 3 framework.  It is fully translatable via the Rosetta service on Launchpad.net, with several languages already fully or partially available. SchoolTool is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.  On Ubuntu Linux, schools can have a SchoolTool server running with a three-step installation process.

For more information see http://schooltool.org

Contact: Tom Hoffman, SchoolTool Project Manager
hoffman@schooltool.org
00 1 401-785-3648

About SchoolTool:

SchoolTool is free administrative software for schools around the world. The goals of the project are to create a simple turnkey student information system, including demographics, gradebook, attendance, calendaring and reporting for primary and secondary schools, as well as a framework for building customized applications and configurations for individual schools or states.

About the Shuttleworth Foundation:

The Shuttleworth Foundation is a South African organisation that invests in social, technical and policy innovation in the fields of education and technology. The Foundation works through active partnerships with local and international organisations.

The Shuttleworth Foundation is founded in an open philosophy that includes the promotion of open source, open standards and open information access with the belief that sharing stimulates change and broadens horizons. It is the further belief of the Shuttleworth Foundation that in an African context this open philosophy is key to progress and an enabler for education.

The planned release date for SchoolTool 1.0 was Thursday, April 23rd, to coincide with the release of Ubuntu Jaunty.

Good news! The developers delivered -- we met our goals for the release on time. It is packaged and in our Launchpad PPA to be installed or fetched via apt-get update.

More good news and another delivery! My second daughter arrived Sunday morning, healthy and three weeks earlier than expected.

Bad news -- I've still got a number of things on my project manager TODO list for the release, including deploying a new website at schooltool.org and updating documentation.

So, rather than having a discombobulated release this week, or neglecting my family, I decided to slide the official release to April 30th.

In the meantime, please try out the current release and FILE BUGS.

David Welsh has created a new set of CanDo screencasts. David used to teach video production and is a born salesman, so these are quite good. The Introduction is, not surprisingly, an excellent 3 minute introduction to the application.

We don't yet have Ubuntu packages for CanDo, but we've at least got the source install documented finally, although we still need to upload a copy of the XML file containing the Virginia competencies before you can really get a feel for how it works on your own box (and to give you an example of the format to import your own competencies, if you've got 'em).