After a long pause, we're happy to present an update on our current development.  The problem hasn't been that nothing has been happening, but that we've been focusing on writing the basic pieces of a new student information system and issuing releases in the middle of that process is difficult when things are changing rapidly.

This alpha release still has a number of rough edges.  In the coming months we'll be focusing on reorganizing the UI (the left sidebar is a mess), finishing the gradebook and creating reports for teachers and administrators.

In the meantime, there is lots of new functionality in SchoolTool.

Attendance

SchoolTool now handles attendance tracking for daily attendance and section (i.e., class) meetings.  Currently teachers access the attendance form for a section via a link on the class meeting on their calendar.  There is one form optimized for use during class, another for batch entry at the end of the day (pictured below).

Student absences and tardies are managed through a workflow, allowing the school adminstrator to accept or reject excuses.

Demographics

SchoolTool now supports a wider range of contact and demographic information about each person.

Access Control

Users of previous versions of SchoolTool should be happy to see that we've vastly simplified access control in this version, picking sensible defaults and allowing a limited number of choices by the school administrator.

Gradebook

There is some grading related code in this alpha release.  Unfortunately, it is code which is currently being exensively revised and just missed being ready for this release, so testing it is not a good use of your time.  We are also re-writing the way terms and academic years work to support complex reporting requirements at the end of terms.

Calendaring

Much work has gone into fixing bugs in our calendaring, most related to timezones.

Installation

This release is only available as a source tarball for various technical reasons.  Upcoming releases will once again have binaries for Ubuntu, Debian and other Linux distributions. 

The source is available here:  SchoolTool-2006.0-alpha2.tgz

However, getting the tarball running requires a number of fairly arcane steps, so we recommend instead downloading and running this shell script which will download the source tarball and a number of other pre-requisites and set everything up. 

Step-by-step Instructions

OK, using the aforementioned shell script makes things easier, but there are still a few steps you need to pay attention to.

1. You need a C development environment ('build-essential' on Ubuntu) and Python development libraries ('python-dev' on Ubuntu).
2. You need the Python Imaging Library ('python-imaging' on Ubuntu) and the Python libxml2 bindings ('python-libxml2' on Ubuntu).
3. You need a very up to date version of Python setuptools, which will probably require downloading a new version of ez_setup.py and running that script as root.
4. Now you can download alpha2-install.sh
   to whatever directory you like to use for testing software and do chmod +x alpha2-install.sh to make it executable and then ./alpha2-install.sh.
5. Hopefully it will then set up the rest of your environment and give you some final instructions when it is done.  You will probably get one error message when it runs the tests.  Please ignore it.

If you're thinking "Gee, you guys can't really expect normal users to go through all that," we'd reply that yes, that's why this is an "alpha" release.  In the fall apt-get install schooltool will again be sufficient.

Credits

Programmers of Vilnius did the attendance, calendaring and access control work.  Infrae did demographics and some back end Zope 3 hacking.  Stephan Richter hacked on (and is still hacking on) the gradebook, terms, and other business process modeling.  Brian Sutherland is our heroic packaging and release manager, which is an even more frustrating task than usual this time around.  Tom Hoffman is responsible for the overall direction and management of the project, for better or worse.