Last year our school’s PowerSchool system wasn’t ready for the first grading period. We ended up handwriting report cards for every student in the building. As the end of the second quarter approached the system still wasn’t ready. I decided to create a solution and, in the course of two days, created a grade/transcript tracking system for the school. Each teacher used a secure login, was presented a list of their courses & students, and was able to enter grades and comments. The system tracked which grades still needed to be entered and, once everything was in, generated printable report cards to mail home. This year the administration decided to go back to PowerSchool, but EVERY grading period multiple teachers ask me why we couldn’t “just use your system that was so much easier.”
Posted by jcasimir, Tue Apr 03 14:29:00 UTC 2007
For the past year I’ve worked on a CMS system for the Chavez Schools. It was designed to support content for two campuses, be easily reconfigured and expanded, and allow granular security access to different users. The framework has proven solid as the school has grown to three campuses, new content and file support, and flexibility for staff and student users. Originally planned to be an open source app, I’ve decided that I’d rather take the lessons learned and rebuild it from scratch.
Posted by jcasimir, Tue Apr 03 14:29:00 UTC 2007
The Special Education department at Chávez was having trouble keeping track of their “anecdotal records.” That is, they needed an easy way to keep track of who-faxed-who-when, upcoming meetings, records of incidents, etc. Basically it is a shared note system. Each user can create notes, has a list of the students on their caseload, can search & view messages by themself and other users, among other features. It is in ongoing development and I plan to, in the near future, roll it into a complete student management system.
Posted by jcasimir, Tue Apr 03 14:28:00 UTC 2007
In the spring I was frustrated with the limitations of our budget and put together a fundraiser we called the Workshop for Good (http://workshopforgood.org). My friends Amy Hoy, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and I instructed a two day workshop to adults from across the country interested in learning the Ruby on Rails web application platform. The workshop was featured on the O’Reilly Radar, Ruby on Rails Official Weblog, and other sites across the web. In the end we raised $10,000 for the students of Chávez. We’re hoping to put together another iteration of the workshop for another charity this summer.
Posted by jcasimir, Mon Apr 02 00:26:00 UTC 2007
I worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to develop literacy-based curriculum materials based around EFF issues. We focused on topics like copyright, peer-to-peer networks, privacy, and remix culture.
I’ve been using the articles in my class to great success. The project is still in development and I plan to do major revisions this summer.