The Online Development Center has just launched an online standards-based elementary report card tool in the Enumclaw School District. Here's a brief description of what the tool does and how we did it.
Many districts are moving to standards-based report cards. Instead of giving students a single grade for "Reading," "Math," and other grades, the standards-based system lists specific items a student is expected to know or do. For example, one of the items under "Writing" is "Writes coherent paragraphs." The result is that both students and parents have a clear idea of how each student is doing in school.
The district had been using a largely paper-based system. They decided to move to an electronic system to help reduce the workload on teachers and other staff, and to ensure consistency across the district. The existing systems they evaluated did not have the flexibility the district needed, so we created a very customizable system for them.
When teachers log into the system (which is integrated into Enumclaw's intranet, and tied to the district's Active Directory), they see their classlist. From here, they can enter grades for individual students or choose to enter grades for some subjects all at once. The grade entry screen was set up to encourage quick data entry. Teachers are also encouraged to enter comments for some subjects. At the district's request, the comment feature allows teachers to write as much as they want.
Specialists, like Physical Education and Music teachers, enter grades through a specific interface. They can enter grades for their subject one class at a time, speeding up their process considerably.
When it comes time to send report cards home, the system produces printable report cards as PDF files. The printed report cards are both attractive and flexible, able to accommodate as much or as little information as provided on each student. As the year progresses, the report card will show a student's grades from the entire year on a single easy-to-read printout. This allows parents and teachers to quickly assess student performance over time. Another notable feature is that report cards can be printed in either English or Spanish.
District administrators can define report card templates for each grade level, providing a good deal of flexibility for the district over the long run. As standards change and evolve, the system can be changed without making programming changes. District administrators can also modify and add students to the system. Most of the student data is imported from the district's student information system, but changes often need to made during the grading period.
On the technical side, the system uses Macromedia ColdFusion as the middleware, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 for data storage. Report card data is generated as XML, then is transformed (using XSLT) into XSL-FO, a XML-based formatting language. The XSL-FO is then transformed into PDF using the Apache Foundation's FOP render. Additional PDF processing is provided by PDFLib. PDFs are cached to the disk to speed operations.
Posted by Karl
October 30, 2003 11:18 AM