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http://schooltool.org/

From their features page:

Teacher Gradebooks

* Use SchoolTool’s gradebook for calculating point or percentage based grades.
* SchoolTool provides a spreadsheet-style gradebook for each class section.
* Each gradebook can be organized as multiple worksheets.
* Assignments and activities can be organized and weighted by categories, such as “Exam” or “Lab,” which can be customized for each site.
* Point-based scores can be converted to grades using flexible, customizable “score systems.’
* Scores are viewable by students, if they are given permission to log into SchoolTool.
* Scores can be exported to .xls spreadsheet format.

There's also School Tool - http://www.schooltool.org/ .

I don't know the exact setup of ADS, but Linux clusters do auto-image all the time. There are plenty of tools for that. SystemImager probably does what you want.

For the whole Exchange server / Sharepoint thing, you're going to pay or you're going to opt for the "free for education" Google Docs.

Open Admin is an extremely mature school management package, and SchoolTool is an up-and-coming one, but school reporting requirements are so strict that many packages won't pass muster.

This kind of migration is extremely difficult and I think you're making too light of it.

http://www.schooltool.org/ The project is funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation and consists of administation infrastructure, student information system and skills tracking programs. It's built on Zope3 and is part of the Ubuntu distribution (comes bundled with the Edubuntu variant by default). Very well built and well conceived software. It's getting more attention in Europe right now, but there are plenty of US users. I think the skills assessment part was built for Virginia schools.

I feel Mark Shuttleworth's heart is in the right place, and much good will come out of various initiatives he is involved in, but I'm thinking specifically of this project of his:
    "The SchoolTool Project"
    http://www.schooltool.org/
From there: "SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source license. SchoolTool encompasses three sub-projects:
        * SchoolTool Calendar and SchoolBell are calendar and resource management tools for schools available as part of the Edubuntu Linux distribution.
        * A SchoolTool student information system is being developed and tested in collaboration with schools in Lithuania and Belgium during the 2006 - 2007 school year
        * CanDo is a SchoolTool-based skills tracking program developed by Virginia students and teachers to track which skills students are acquiring in their classes and at what level of competency."

So that software is definitely intended to be applicable in the USA.

I think the "Hole in the Wall" approach pioneered by Sugata Mitra has a lot to recommend itself as an approach to help kids in poor areas. From:
        http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm
"Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research efforts at New Delhi's NIIT, a fast-growing software and education company with sales of more than $200 million and a market cap over $2 billion. But Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education." ...
To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree. ...
What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him."

Also of great potential for learning is the "Fab Lab" idea:
    http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/
From there: "Fab Labs are the educational outreach component for the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... By making accessible engineering in space (down to microns, through precision machining) and time (down to microseconds, through RISC microcontrollers), these facilities have been uncovering what can be thought of as instrumentation and fabrication divides, and suggesting that they can be addressed by bringing IT development rather than just IT to the masses. ... CBA Fab Labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, Ghana, Boston and Costa Rica. Fab Lab outreach projects are being explored with a growing group of institutional partners and countries including Panama, Trinidad, South Africa, the National Academies, the Indian Department of Science and Technology, and the Africa-America Institute."

Link for the above mentioned US DOE statistics on total K-12 spending:
    http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index .html
The specific chart:
    http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlit e-chart.html#2

And a related essay by someone else also commenting on Shuttleworth Foundation's SchoolTool project:
    "School system needs revolution, not evolution"
    http://ninjamonkeys.co.za/index.php/2005/03/07/sch ool_system_needs_revolution_not_evolu
From that essay: "The Shuttleworth Foundation has been investing a lot of money in school administration and computer labs. Both of these projects are worthwhile efforts. The former allowing teachers to spend less time administrating and more time teaching, and the latter allowing kids to get involved in computers which are a critical aspect of nearly every high paying job today. But more money needs to be invested in creating engaging learning materials and in creating an environment to help students learn real life skills."

The direct link to SchoolTool itself:
    http://www.schooltool.org/

A related essay by me on this topic:
    "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html
From there: "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change."

Mark "Mr. Ubuntu Linux" Shuttleworth has a team he sponsors building on a project called 'School Tool'. It's a) built in Zope, which is quite possibly the most advanced (if yet compareatively slower) web application server in existance and probably the most sophisticated enviroment for this sort of thing and b) is a project that is in extremly good shape (having failed once when attempted in Java) and lead by people with solid software developement experience and skills. If SchoolTool doesn't solve your multiple-timesheets problems I'd say your outa luck because AFAICT it's the best software for this sort of thing there is.

Moodle (moodle.org) is great, but so is that other Free Software e-learning and course management web application Dokeos (dokeos.com). (A fork of ex-Claroline, by the original authors, who are no longer employed by the UCL who owns the trademark Claroline.)

Which one is the best, Moodle or Dokeos, ultimately comes down to personal preferences. In general Dokeos is more Blackboard-like, and I know several institutions who choose Dokeos because of the lower learning curve, having used Blackboard before.

Also worth noting is another free software package, a project funded by the (Mark) Shuttleworth Foundation: SchoolTool (schooltool.org), including SchoolBell. It's not an e-learning and course management web application, but rather a school infrastructure administration tool.

Funny to see this piece dredged up again. I'm the blogger Mark references in the story, Tom Hoffman, and for the past year and a half I've been managing the renewed SchoolTool development effort, after Steve Alexander created a new Zope 3 based architecture.

It is definitely tricky to manage a project with such broad and lofty goals, and we've still had our share of mis-steps and mis-directions. I have a background as a teacher and self-taught Zope hacker, so I've learned a lot of lessons about software development.

Nonetheless, a useful application is in sight. We'll have a beta this spring and serious testing in real schools in the fall of 2006. One key this time around was keeping the burn rate down and not creating specific expectations in schools and with governments that we subsequently failed to meet.

If you're interested in open source software for schools, check out http://schooltool.org./

http://www.schooltool.org/

Summary of current status as I read it: SchoolTool still isn't really there, but they did manage to get the spinoff 'SchoolBell' out there, and the SchoolTool work is ongoing and being included in the 'Edubuntu' distro.

Ok. For those that didn't realize it, that blog entry was from 2003. Today, three years later on, where is the SchoolTool project? Did Mark really learn a lesson and develop a solution or did he just relive a trend he noticed so long ago?

Seems to be a long development cycle for a specialized calendar. I'm glad I'm not paying for it.

It is my opinion that the developers of ubuntu did not write edubuntu with the intention of hooking children on linux. I'm sure that was a factor, but i would like to believe that the idea was to create on operating system that would aid in the education process. I am a technology assistant for a school system.

I agree, i think that is exactly what they intended. Which is why (IMHO) they included the SchoolTool Calendar.

Development of SchoolTool, an open source school administration system, is done in such a way.

The driving force behind it is the Shuttleworth Foundation, but they have hired different people and teams of people, for different parts of the project.

In my experience it's this kind of set up is quite common in the open source business world. The reason there is many of the companies aren't large enough to handle really large projects, but they are if they form networks.

The company I work for has benefited from this, by passing work we had no capacity for along to others and vice versa. I think this kind of thing will only work if you know and trust the other party, so it's worth investing in long term relationships with other companies, much more than getting it done as cheaply/quickly as possible.

Shuttleworth has been funding the The School Tool Project to create better educational infrastructure. This is something that has the potential to significantly decrease operational costs for public schools in a variety of countries.

SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source licence. http://www.schooltool.org/ Mike

Do a Google on "Cutter" and "Orwell school" - they've been smart because for some apps you need Windows - all the rest is done via Terminal Servers (note to OpenOffice: why is your memory footprint so much larger than StarOffice?).

The Ubuntu lot have a link into the SchoolTool efforts of Mark Shuttleworth, and anyone who's followed the FLOSS in Government trails will know about the fantastic work that has taken place in the Extramadura region in Spain. Link to all the presentations.

There is far, far more happening out there than the UK Government seems to know - I wonder when they finally try and spend some money efficiently and emulate what the Spanish did. Could be a new concept: actual *efficient* use of tax money...

It seems to have some potential.
I'm just waiting for LDAP support :(

http://www.schooltool.org/schoolbell/

Maybe schooltool.org. Shuttleworth at it again.

Schoolbell has a calendar component (schoolbell is a subset of the code for Schooltool, a school administration server being developed with $$ from Mark Shuttleworth). It could be the free-server end of what you want (you said you didn't want a server that cost anything; I assume a free one is okay).

SchoolBell allows users to manage their personal calendars, group calendars and calendars for resources, e.g., rooms, projectors, etc, via a web interface, or using an iCalendar compliant client such as Mozilla calendar or iCal.

You can:

1. create users, groups and resources through web forms or bulk import (in CSV format);
2. view and edit calendars for each user, group or resource using an ICal client;
3. use the web interface to manage user and group calendars;

Once you've got your calendars in ICal format, there are a number of other tools that can help you manage them, such as evolution for users, or pcal to output calendars as postscript.

Schoolbell has a calendar component (schoolbell is a subset of the code for Schooltool, a school administration server being developed with $$ from Mark Shuttleworth). It could be the free-server end of what you want (you said you didn't want a server that cost anything; I assume a free one is okay).

SchoolBell allows users to manage their personal calendars, group calendars and calendars for resources, e.g., rooms, projectors, etc, via a web interface, or using an iCalendar compliant client such as Mozilla calendar or iCal.

You can:

1. create users, groups and resources through web forms or bulk import (in CSV format);
2. view and edit calendars for each user, group or resource using an ICal client;
3. use the web interface to manage user and group calendars;

Once you've got your calendars in ICal format, there are a number of other tools that can help you manage them, such as evolution for users, or pcal to output calendars as postscript.

Ubuntu, SchoolTool,Translate.org.za are some of the projects you support that seem to tackle the digital-divide head-on. Do you have any views or ideas on how to make Internet access cheaper so more people in developing countries can have access to it? More specific, any plans on convincing the South African government that not over-regulating the telecoms industry will be good for everyone?

School Tool is a system specifically designed for running a school. It's written in Python, and it's free, open-source software.

http://www.schooltool.org/

steveha

And, all the pretty desktops that run on Linux don't mean squat if the bean counters and other non-techie PHBs never considers evaluating them. I think this has to be done on both fronts, PR to people that control the purse strings at larger companies, and investment in developers that produce commercial class applications.

Yes, and you are so right. But... do yourself a massive favour and have a gander at Mark Shuttleworth's Home page.

On the right hand side you'll see quite a couple of projects he's involved in and funding, including:

• The Shuttleworth Foundation to fund innovative projects in education,
• The SchoolTool Project to produce a common global platform for school administration,
• It's Hip2BSquare! pro-education campaign,
• The ultra-cool UpStarts, an entrepreneurial incubator, and
• Of import to OSS developers, some bounties!

As per ususal, in my own Quixotic way, I'm planning on helping as far I can...

Even if it is just mouthing off on /. <grin>

Most of the bounty cash will probably end up going to SchoolTool development. SchoolTool is a Python-based school administration application, primarily for schools in the developing world. Steve Alexander, a leading Zope developer, is currently leading the work with his team in Lithuania. The server is based on Zope 3 code and the Twisted framework. It'll feature a REST web service interface. Hopefully, this will provide a relatively simple, robust and clean platform to allow schools to manage their data with a minimum of up-front expense and administrative burden.