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.

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).

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"SchoolToolers" -- this is the general non-technical discussion and announcement list.

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We held a three day SchoolTool sprint at the Arlington Career Center last weekend, Feb. 6-8. In attendance were Ignas Mikalajūnas, Alan Elkner, Douglas Cerna, Filip Sufitchi, Chris Carey, Jason Straw, Matt Gallagher, Jeff Elkner and Tom Hoffman. These events are getting pretty routine (in a good way). Everyone knows the application and sprint processes very well, and we're able to get right down to work and keep rolling straight through the weekend. The only snafu was a rather comprehensive failure of the school district's network Saturday night. We ended up relocating to the Straw family dining room, and we all appreciate Jason and his family's hospitality and tolerance.

We hit our major development goals:

• Flexible Demographics -- Ignas, Filip and Alan implemented a new demographics system that is customizable through the web by a site administrator. This is what everyone wanted all along, but I didn't want to promise it for 1.0. Turns out that if you're going to allow any customizability at all, it is just as easy to go all the way. The biggest headache is what to do when a user decides to edit an existing schema. Basically we're leveraging our spreadsheet import/export, so the workflow will be: export your existing data > change the demographic attributes in SchoolTool > rejigger the columns in your exported spreadsheet to match what's now in SchoolTool > reimport your rejiggered data.
• Contacts -- Contact information (i.e., parent address, phone, etc) is now stored as separate objects from the student, so you can have multiple parents, etc. per student (Ignas).
• External Activities -- Douglas finished his work for Jeff on connecting CanDo to the SchoolTool gradebook. You can now pull activity scores from CanDo into SchoolTool.
• Gradebook Simplification -- We spent a while discussing the nonsensical math of grading systems. For example, if a student has three scores, an "A," a "87" and a "Pass," what's the average? We decided to limit the 1.0 version of the gradebook to numerical scores to keep it transparent and predictable for everyone. Alan implemented this change.
• UI -- Chris Carey made SchoolTool gradebook use consistent colors via CSS when they do score validity checking. He also added the timetable ID to the timetable view (needed for section imports).
• Section Resource Booking -- Chris added basic support for reserving a resource to every meeting of a section.
• Documentation -- Tom and Jason re-organized the SchoolTool Book. Tom created an annotated import spreadsheet.

12th Annual Kickoff Technology Policy Exhibition:

This event serves as a great opportunity for policymakers, industry executives and public interest advocates to come together and to network with their peers. The goal of this annual tech exhibition is to bring cutting-edge technology demonstrations to Capitol Hill that illustrate the power and flexibility of the Internet as medium for communications, commerce, and democracy.

The good news is that people around the world are trying out SchoolTool right now. The bad news is that we know that from all the bug reports that came in this weekend after Ignas updated some packages on Friday afternoon.

The first lesson here for me is not to give Ignas the goal of putting out a non-trivial update "by the end of the week," which tends to result in late Friday releases followed by weekend bug reports. We'll return to our previous practice of doing releases on Tuesday, which gives us ample time to discuss the details in our Monday IRC meeting and time to put out fires without ruining anyone's weekend.

Note that post-1.0 (April) we'll tighten this up further, but at this point we want to push changes and fixes out quickly and let people have a crack at them.

Finally, I'd just like to stress that if you're having a problem with SchoolTool, don't bang your head against it for hours. If you are having a problem, it is a bug, either a bug in programming, or user interace design, or documentation. We need you to tell us what is broken. You aren't inconveniencing us!