Where am I at

1 reports
2 Application development
3 Course design
4 future

1. reports are now coming to a close, yes those dreaded things that teachers spend a whole lot of time to complete, for students to read in less than 10 seconds, and then the wonderment if they get home for parents to read and see. that's if they get to see the reports. These have bee a struggle for me this year as the changes with the Students Management System and they way school does reports have hit. I was not at school last year around this time, and I will tell you something, it is a shock for them to come up, get proofread, make changes to the ones that are needed, and deal with those staff that start getting angry at you for making there jobs harder because you kept him/her within the comment, ok that one was not me.

2. Application Development
Changes to the option choice selection need to be made by Thursday night, with a new layout and design this year we need to make the changes, though one slight problem... I got given the change document last Friday. I have yet to get my head around the changes and still have not been told what to do with the new subjects, as well as who needs access to it. I will get a large amount of work done tomorrow on it, when I get myself around excel and create the 10-15 course for each departmentt that they can put in. though i now see one giant problem just typing this in, I have year level subjects and school wants to change it to level subjects, maybe I need to create a form that staff can put the information into in google apps that I can then take and put into my system, I don't think that this is gonna work too good right now.

3. course design
oh man are there some changes coming or what, with the introduction of digital technology in the technology curriculum, means that we are having to redo some of our courses. the biggest change will be to the year 11 course, or at our school the Level 1 course. We are looking at three sections of the new standards, Digital Information, Digital media, and Programming and computer science. Though I have no idea what language or media we are going to use yet. but we have also been asked to look at the progression of courses for the future as well.
We have some time coming up in which we can talk about this as a department and make the changes that are needed to support the New Zealand Curriculum 2007.

4 future
can't say anything yet, still in the process of writing.

Ok, Ok, I got runners up in a award for innovative programme, now one of the things that this is about is a course that looks at environmental issues at the school, we have a stream down the back, students are to design an application to record the data that they collect down at the stream, Now I have not had time to get this implemented yet, though term 3 and 4 will look just about right, and it can carry out next year as well. It is a case of getting the students on task and developing there creative thing at the moment.

The book and moodle course that I am using for the programming course and working well, though they slower students are starting to slacken off and the motivated students are getting crazier in there programming, and the exercises are getting harder. I have an issue around some of the students not doing as much as they could do, because I cannot move them, if I move them it affects the year 13 cprogramming class as well due to I am using virtual hard drives to do teh work.

I would love to play around with some more software, especially when it comes to flow charts. I want to get Visual Studio Learning Pack 2.0 as I can see some applications within it useful.

I really want to play with
Visual Programming Flow Chart is a supplementary teaching tool designed to help students understand program control flow. It generates flow charts for functions and saves them in the JPG picture format. This tool is easily activated from the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) by simply right-clicking on a function name and choosing “Generate flow chart…” from the context menu. The resulting flowchart can be customized by changing its colors and other effects. This visual tool provides an intuitive way to explore source code, to examine its control flow, and to identify logic errors.

subject choice .6c

Included in this years release is the change to preload subjects choices, this is at the moment being called out of the subject table, column new6, if there is anything put into this field it will be shown in the subject selection, the student cannot select anything else.

So far, three areas want preloaded selections, deaf unit, richards centre and lifeskills, all that is needed is the students school id number.

The next chance to be made is some minor interface changes to make it look a bit nicer, so far all testing is working and all students have been loaded.

Juniors insert in the junior table,

Seniors insert in the senior table, so all students can select there subjects at once.

1540 students this year so far will have the opportunity to select there 2010 subjects online.

Subject choice .6b

I had a email today with a bug issue in it. "had a bit of a problem with this. Once you press submit you cannot go back, I have made a mistake in *subject removed* but have pressed submit and now can’t change it."Whenever an HoD submitted there changes to the subject information it would replace the subject name with the department code and would empty out the name field. This was found when an HoD made a mistake and wanted t

o go back and change it, all of a sudden the subject was not available.

name=name

dept=name

should have been

name=name

dept=dept

all fixed but included this as a version update. Also included a extra feature that allows teachers with the code of dept=all to go through and print off all subjects, so these can be copied and pasted into another application.

subject choice ver 6a

New features added,
Departments can now change all there information online, added HoD's of depts into the teacher database, also added the depts into the subject table, now the HoD's can only change the subjects they have in their dept.

One of the biggest issues is who is in charge of each dept and how to spell their name.

2 hours

subject choice 2009

This week has been a busy week with waka ama taking a very front seat and my imminent departure from my current place of work. Which has left some things that have needed to be sorted out, first is e-asttle and the final reporting and testing from it, we have 37 students that still need to complete the 2 tests, this will be fired at them period 2 tomorrow so we have this. Instead of the two weeks testing it has turned into a mission of getting classes in, rescheduling issues to to many things happening inside and outside of school.

Which brings me to days' blog article, the subject choice system that was created last year. This has been something which has been put on the back burner for a while and made its reappearance. There was a brief one hour meeting on Wednesday which has brought up a number of questions.

Next term is the development of the curriculum guide where information is saught from departments on current plans and courses for the next year. With the new curriculum this is going to be interesting. But how are we going to hand out this information, do we carry on with the current system of multiple pieces of paper going back and forth, or provide an electronic solution which cuts down on paper and mis-communication.

• Next is how we deliver the curriculum guide, do we do an electronic version or carry on with the paper version, can we cut down some of the information that is not required anymore. Do parents look at this and talk it over with the students. Talking to some today, they wonder why they are given the year 11 course information when they are moving into year 13.
• The process, the process that we gave the students last year, we have 87 students not complete the option choice process, can we do better than that this year?
• Option lines, last year we gave them the choice of developing there package, their course, and the idea was that the SMS would just be able to click a button and a timetable would be able to be produced, this didn't quite work out too well. There was only a 20% match and when the timetablers put in option lines from the previous years did things start to work to a 90% match. With a bit more tweaking they managed to get a 98% non clash timetable.
• Custom timetables of the special needs unit and satellite unit as well as the ESOL department need to be taken into account. We have to pre load special needs and satellite unit students into this so they don't choose that extra subject or have a blank.
• It would be interesting to hear from the deans that had to chase up students that had blanks and other erroneous data in there option choices. Talking to some of them, the process worked well, though we have talked about timetabling form classes into computer labs to help get these numbers down, but what about the students that do it at home, the idea was to enable parents to become involved in helping there kids choose a course and subjects that are suitable and not just what their friends are taking.
• Involvement of key staff, so we have to have a meeting of key staff to talk about changes and development. What do they see as the issues that could be updated and changed.
• One thing to do is to load all the Head of Departments into the system and enable access to change the curriculum details of their subjects, also need to be able to export all of these.
• I still have all the old information of students in the system, so I flush this out and start fresh or do we show them what they have taken in the past two or three years so they can make an informed decision about here career path.
• Uploading of students, this has to be more defined and clear this year, I don't want to be having to go through and doing a find and replace of date of births this year. http://forums.codewalkers.com/php-coding-7/uploading-csv-to-mysql-via-php-881697.html

Here is a link to some of my development ideas, the others are sitting in my visual diary sorry.

http://oneteachersview.blogspot.com/search/label/subject%20options

subject choice

Version 5.a
Add junior functionality, have added a table called subject_jnr

need to add junior export of data as well as change the export scripts not to export junior data just yet.

some extra functionality of exports is required

Subject Choice .4a

Year 9 moving onto Year 10

Option lines have bee added to the specific subjects to be in certain areas.

If I want to I can place subjects into option lines and display.

Code for this is in my book.

So it can be done, just need to develop database to take note of the change and carry them through to confirm and finish pages

At the moment this is on the usb drive 2008.4a

Problems getting this developed, because I do my best coding at night, information is not available straight away from people.

Taster courses and pre ncea course information from year 9 to year 10, at the moment they are 10jap and 10jap1, this breaks my schema of varchar(5). Don't believe I should have to change all of this to varchar(6)

Need to add import csv feature for students update. This is causing me a few problems.

Nieuan and kapa are in because they have standards attached. This has been an issue from day one of the development of this.

One of teh issues with year 9 to year 10 has been 

Question: what do we need to export, what information use to be entered in the past.

Every student need to take english, maths, science, pe and social studies, they only need to choose their language, arts technology options. 

This is the only stuff that needs to be exported.

subject choice .3d

Changes to report systems in teacher part to allow for list to be printed in year and house order, and by form class order.

Also looking at being to integrate year 9 into the system, working out how I could work through the 19 subjects some of these students have into the 8 subjects that is currently in the students imported database.

got ahead of myself with the post, should have been .3d

subject choice

version 2.0c
fixing up spelling errors,
entering in last peices of text to help students, though i do need to modify one more part, they don't have to choose in options lines, there are no option lines.
Fix up list of subjects displayed for this year, subject 1 was shown twice, instead of subject 2.

and graphics as well as css updates.

subject choice bugs

working through the bugs in it, testing to see whether I can take subjects that i know are hidden is one of the bugs

SELECT code, name FROM table where year = " .$year." or year = ".$prevyear." and hide = 0 order by year desc

shoudl have worked, however it ended up to need some () in place to help with the and or statement

SELECT code, name FROM table where (year = " .$year." or year = ".$prevyear.") and hide = 0 order by year desc
is correct.

Now 13STU (13 Study) is hidden so they can not select it more than once. :)

I have a meeting with the development team tomorrow at lunchtime. This I hope will go smooth and they will come back with a few modifications. If they don't come back with modification I know that I have done something wrong, as they should be asking about features or they have thought of something that I haven't.

One of the issues that we have is that the curriculum guide has been developed without listing the subject codes that I use throughout my program, these are five digit codes that will go back into the student management system. What we are going to do is print a list off.

Also required is a list of the hidden codes so we can hide the information. However we need a way of getting the deaf and richard centre students in.

A check of all the information that we have in the subjects table. The problems we have faced the most is around 12 science with two 12SCI subjects, and 12 technology apparel which has two cost listings in it.

It needs to be pointed out in the system that this is preliminary and not the final subject choice as they may not have the conditions of entry, there might be a clash, class sizes might be too small or too large. This statement is being written up tonight and will be implemented into the system tomorrow morning during the ICT PD development time.

online subject system

Version 2008.3a

the ability to hide a subject from being shown in the student list is now available. When you change the subject details through the teacher part you can change a hide code from 0 shown, to 1 hidden. Later on I could make this a combo box where it shows the words instead of a 1 or 0.

But this makes it a little less confusing when students already have english selected for them, they cannot select another english subject again.

These changes have now been made tothe live server.

Require a list of subjects that cannot select, especially when it comes to esl english. Though how do we put in richard centre and deaf centre students, this question is still to be answered.

Notes
I have been thinking about the maths, english, science question that was posed to me early on and it was decided that it wasn't going to be developed under this version, however, if I was to develop it I think it would be a valuable part of the system. Being able to say that if your were english you could assign students to a subject, since all the information is in one column of data the UPDATE statement would be quite easy to do, though if the students had not selected their subjects you would need to use the INSERT...ON DUPLICATE KEY statement that I used when changing their subjects to allow multiple times.
All the csv files look for is whether it is filled in or not, SELECT details from table where filled = 1;
They would have something in the export to KAMAR file as their would be information in the transaction table. It would be just their compulsory subjects.
How would I want it to look, would you bring in all students at a time, or develop a login for teachers in a subject to change where they think the students should go. You would also have to include the previous years english class in the information, and at the moment this is spread over 6 fields.
Another question: I have to ask is how do they want the 11FIN/11HEA/11GYM details to be entered.

subject system version 0.3

just in the process of uploading the work to the live site now for testing, I think I am going to break it, as the site does not allow persistent connection, so i may have to rewrite some of the code to put a mysql close statement in at the end of each query

So this could make it version 0.3, then if all the changes need to be made 0.3a

We will see with my amazing upload speed of 0.1K a sec.

It has taken me a while to get the site going, I had a problem with getting the sql data imported, it was producing a rails error. Going through the support tickets with the company they explained that it could not be carried out one way, and instead got me going through my site and through a port at the end. This proved to work, and all 372K of data was imported correctly.

I had a problem with the database not working, this was fixed by removing the user and recreating the user again. All seemed to work after that.

It is now LIVE

This is now been taken off the development server and made live to do some checking that it will work(issues identified above), as i have just put it on to make sure it works, I have not updated the version number yet, will probably go to 2008.3a

Have created some extra users and emailed details out to certain staff for feedback and ideas. I know I have to make some cosmetic changes but this was mainly to check that the functionality works.

subject choice system

Version 2.0d
I have been thinking over the night that there is no security on modifying subjects or seeing who has or hasn't completed filling in the form. I have implemented a teachers table that hold first name, last name, login and password in md5 format and included session ids so that noone can make changes if they haven't logged in.

This is included in the teacher folder within the program, so it seperates the login form, and all the teacher stuff in another area for admin, or should I call it admin?

I have taken out majority of the development codes that I have used to check the passing of variables and added comments to various other parts in case I have to make cahnges.

I have to load up dreamweaver and do a search for all login-form.php and change this to index.php

online subject system

Version 0.2b
This was getting all the exporting systems working, these were mentioned in the previous post, these involved the export to KAMAR file, as well as who has not filled in their options.

Version 0.2c
In this version we have improved the display of the system, the top section that displays the users details.

Also am looking at including a print option so students can print off their options, this will be availble in a pdf format using the software below.
http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/

Also have to look at changing the versioning of the system to include the year, so we know hen it was last worked on.

All subjects have now been entered, working on getting the teach-edit system up and working, one to rip the information out of the database and insert it into the text fields, and two to submit it back into the database. I am having some difficultly getting the information back in with my UPDATE syntax, will sleep on it tonight and see what I can do on Thursday. I have the fckeditor in basic mode so all you can do is bold, italic, list number and unordered list working on two of the fields, content and assessment. the rest use textarea and input type = text html tags.

I have backed up the sql in case I break it over the next couple of days.
- I need to look at other pdf creators, I am unsure what I need to do to get this working, and what to put in it. I basically need to wait for the stakeholders to come back to work before continuing, but then I will have probably run out of time.

Another question is why i am looking at using pdf to print it out, maybe i should be looking at using print/css which would do the same

one of the things that I also need to do is print off screen shots so I can get someone to draw on them where they want objects to go. I can remember some of the changes that were suggested but not all.

Version 2.0c
Subject modification is now functioning in a webpage rather than just in phpmyadmin, you can select the subject and then submit, this will bring up the details of the subject and allow editing. Changes are saved. One issue with not forgetting to change the where the code = xxxx this was set to 12pro.

Notes
Thinking about changing the version to 0.2d with the changes to the teachers side of things. However I have one more thing to work on which is the ability to print a form off with the students details, options and previous options with a number of words that mention you may make changes up to this date...

Have to check to see if I meet the specifications of this project, I need to find my viusal diary to be able to read my notes. Also to go back through the blog postings to see if I have implemented ideas when working through.

I have been thinking about the hours that I have worked on this
Friday 9am to 5pm
Monday 9am to 5pm
Tuesday 10:30 to 5pm
If I was a student doing this as a project, how many weeks would that be approx 22 hours of class time, not including work I have done at home plus the 8 hours I did at the start to get the basics working for the beta meeting, 30 hours. Basically 8 weeks of work.

Check against the specs

I found one of my documents today from one of the development meetings that was held last term, I have been checking to see that I have done everything on it

Online Senior Option Selection 08
ReasonTo reduce work load for staff both ancillary and teaching. Bonuses: Can be done at last minute

Considerations
Design: ease of use, allows for multi level, reminds/controls of subject prerequisites, shows present subjects.

Security:
insuring student can only select there own selection, importing into Kamar

Method:
when, how, via English classes/ option choice afternoon, via the internet?

Procedures:
Who has selection rights, student select? Teacher control., Parent input. When will changes take place? Before or after entry into Kamar

Stages:
T2 wk 9? Hand out option books
T3 wk 2-4 Teachers inform/promote their class/level(Maths, Eng) selections
T3 wk 4 Form teachers advise (From teacher)
T3 wk 5 Students make selection online
T3 wk 5 English/maths teachers make selections online?
T3 wk 6 Data imported into Kamar, Option lines, class list.
T3 wk 7 Printout to subject heads? Comments
T3 wk 8-9 Kamar updated
T3 wk 10 HODs sort teachers requirements?

---

I also found a timeline, though I look at it and I wonder when I would have had the time. Though i wonder when I started developing this?
I think back to one of the first meetings that I had with the SLT incharge and the questions and work that was done back then
it looks to be around the 13 June from a previous blog post. That means I have developed this in around a month?
Now looking at the calendar below I am doing well. This was a calendar that was developed before my input.

Timeline for senior option selection

Date Task
T2 w3 Preliminary planning
T2 w4 Discussion with other stake holders
T2 w5 Main issues identified, initial design, procedures
T2 w7 Mock up of data entry, draft procedures
T2 w8 Demo to main stake holders
T2 w9 Trail run, data importing, reports
T3 w1 Trail run 2 with selected students
T3 w3 First run with whole class

Subject Choice system up to version 0.2a

Today was all about getting the fuctionality of the system up and going and the requirement of the various year levels working properly, below are just some of the features that i had been working on, some took me more time to implement as I had to learn how to use them using phpmyadmin just to get the syntax right.

i also started looking at getting the uptodate unit and achievement standards in, however the files are rather large, I am looking at approx 42 meg of text and these have a problem, they also include all the expired unit and achievement standards

I am working on having a release date this week due to the timeframes that are involved.

Also you may asking why am I versioning this app, the reason is I don't want to break it all, just a small component, that means if I do do some major damage like I did earlier in the build, I deleted a whole section and saved it, notepad only undoes once, not multiple times.

Overview of the system

login-form.php logging in

login-exec.php check the database to see if the user exists, and checks against the md5 password

member-index.php the main form that the student uses to fill in all the required fields

member-confirm.php a page that displays the information so the student can check the details, if there is anything wrong they hit the back button

member-finished.php does all the entries into the database

Version 0.1c

• If they are year 13 then they have to have 13stu
• If they are year 12 they have to have 12eng
• If they are year 11 they have to have 11mat 11eng 1gym/fin/hea
• Can a year 13 take year 12 subjects, yes this has been included, all years can take the previous years class, apart from year 11 who cannot take year 10.
• AJAX working to display information about subjects. This just needs a clean up, as there is an issue with formatting not coming through, will have to implement HTML tags to clean up.
  
• School and version created in a table, and reads into footer.php which is included on all pages at the bottom of the page.

Version 0.1d

• Included a way to make changes to subjects you have already selected, using a function in mySQl that is MySQL INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE syntax http://www.bitbybit.dk/carsten/blog/?p=113
• If you have filled in the form already , it will display what you chose last time
• Added in reserve options, in case you don’t get the options that you chose. These have been implemented as reserve1 and reserve2
• You don't have to fill in all options, there is no error checking on that yet. Is this a requirement
  

Version 0.2a

• added in returning to school, this will be shown as Yes, No, Not Sure, but when it goes into the database it is a number, 1, 2, 3. What you selected when you filled in the form originally will be shown when you enter in again.

Still to do,

make more of it using session ids rather than $_POST information through?
Tidy up Curriculum Guide - implement fck editor
Career goal? does this need to be added
Cleaning up the interface, css and maybe boxes around certain items this is the fieldset and legend html tags this allows you to put the information into boxes, I have still to figure out how many of these to create and where to put them, but it seems simple enough, 1 box around the 6 subjects, and another around the two reserve input fields, also are you planning on returning next year, for the selection. As well as another one around the details of the subject. Might use pencil in firefox, an addon to do some design work. on how it might look.

Final outputs - KAMAR and who hasn't filled it in.

• http://en.allexperts.com/q/PHP4-3507/CSV-File-2.htm ideas on how to put a file out to a csv file.
  
• for the KAMAR export use "SELECT concat( '2009T_', id ) AS id, sub1, sub2, sub3, sub4, sub5, sub6, res1, res2 FROM subject_new"; though I am probably going to have to put a year
  Done Completed - Version 0.2
  
• Note this needs to be fixed, add identifier in so we can use it for multiple years, maybe in the custom table
  
• Have used the same code but modified to see is filled = 0, this is to see if teh students have not filled in the form
  Done Version 0.2b

Subject Choice system

I spent the majority of today populating the tables required for the students subject choice system, inputting all the subjects, entry requirements, content, assessments and costs. this takes quite a while, it is having to be copied and pasted out of a word document into phpmyadmin. One of the issues with this is that all the assessment information is in a table, which I need to convert to text with a space separating the information instead of a tab. But it has got me thinking, maybe the next iteration of the subject choice system is to see how many standards are used and getting the staff to input just the standard number and the rest of the information comes up. Which means our curriculum guide would be up to date always. Just need a scheme to have the data to be imported correctly.

Which leads me to some of the issues I have had today, the number of options in the curriculum guide does not match up with what I have been given. There are two year 12 SCI classes, in which there should be one SCI and SCU. And does the hospitality course have a Nil cost or is it $35?

I have managed to get all the students subject information in correctly after a good couple of hours, some issues have been, how many subjects does a year 10 student do, 9 or 10? Which you export information out of KAMAR in CSV format there is a space between the comma and the subject, example , 12PRO, the space is counted as a character in my mysql table so I get the result of , 12PR, which of course is wrong.

And making all the students date of births md5 encrypted, hasn't been a easy job, considering the date of '12/12/1990' should be inputted as md5('12/12/1990') which I have had to use wordpad to do the adding of md5(' ') which has been fun as there is a student with a date of birth in 1987 which I missed and caused chaos to my importing. 2 hours to get the data scheme right with the right spaces. will have to work out a better way as this will be required to be entered by someone else next year, or do I make a macro in excel to do this? As well as encoding the md5 checksum?

But, it has been solved, and added, though I do not think I will be changing the details on these tables for a while now. Just maybe adding the odd new student in one by one might be safer.

And we now have working login system with session ID's. This has been worked through by the use of someone elses script, which after a bit of reading and some working through has revealed itself to be quite useful. http://phpsense.com/php/php-login-script.html

Though it did require me to work through how to decrypt a md5, the password on the account that is created is passme

I now have integrated the work that I have done already on the other pages to select the options, and insert the options into a transfer table.

To be done next is:

• To get the Ajax components working, so when you select the 5 letter code of the subject it comes up with what the subject is and the entry requirements. I am using this tutorial http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/php_ajax_database.asp to try and word out what I need to do though I keep ending up with an error
  
• A way to make changes to the subjects that you have already selected.
  
• School and versioning information included in a table to make changes specific to each school that it is installed.?
  
• Are you returning to school, career goal?
• What qualifications are you going for insert into the subjects table? NCEA level 1, 2, 3 see this for example http://otumoetaicollege.co.nz/subjectchoiceresources.html
• Next iteration, max number of students to take a subject. As this system could be used to handle suspended timetable days in which First in, First Serve needs to be shown.
  
• Who hasn't completed filling out the form? select firstname, surname, year, form from subjects where completed = 0, 1 means they have completed it.
  
• A way to display all the curriculum guide information through one page? curriculum.php?subjectcode=XXxxx
  
• The exported csv done to meet the KAMAR requirements.
  
• Do I record IP address that it was filled in on. date and time?
• Reserve subjects, in case things just don't fit in right as we are not going with option lines.
  

Next iteration of the system

• Input of standards, unit and achievement standards, gain the information from the NZQA database and import it into the system. I have the file already in my email, just need to find the schema so I can remove all the old and unused unit and achievement standards
• HOD being able to change their subject details online, maybe using the YUI editor so they can do bullet points and the like.
  I looked at using the Yahoo editor and decided against it, I have instead looked at the FCK editor and decided I can integrate it easier into the current system and will do what i require it to do. The developers code to get it in is located here. http://docs.fckeditor.net/FCKeditor_2.x/Developers_Guide/Integration/PHP
• Max number of students to take a subject, this allows it to be used in a different way as describe above.
• a way to make the importation of the SMS data into the system easier. 4 hours to modify, empty, insert, check, test, import the csv, export to sql, find and replace in wordpad because notepad sucks at this, is just crazy.

I have found it good just to hide away and work on this today, though I know I need more time to get it done, as well as the need to get the portal site looking good as well.

Just some information, I am using portable apps to run the development site on a usb stick, for those interested I am running http://portableapps.com/apps/development/xampp it seems to be doing the job, you just have to remove the ticks beside the SVC in the console program. I have been running it on my eeepc and connecting to it through the wireless network at work, it just means I can take it and use it anywhere I need to, just a pity i can't run it on my mac.

This blog has had a number of changes to it along way in the last couple of days to accommodate my notes and ideas for the next version, I know I should properly use a wiki, but you use what you have at the time.

developing school software

I am in the process of going through and developing a project document for our school. We want to move the subject options from students wandering around to teachers and getting forms signed to a more electronic form. This has been asked for, for a number of years now, but now with a change of management and knowledge it is being implemented.

I have been in the process of talking to a number of stakeholders about what they think the system should do and getting information about the current system from the information that we already have, to what we can export from the SMS and what we need to import to the SMS.

Talking to the stakeholders they can see a number of benefits of the new system, however, timeframe and availability have not been discussed. If we are to get all senior students to enter their subject choices, howe is this going to be carried out Do we take a compulsory class and do it with them, who will support the students in logging in, how are the students going to login to the system. Or do we make workstations available around the school so students can go to the page, enter their information and select their subjects, think web koisk.

I am looking at using my favourites, php and mySQL. Just doing some basic database development today I think I can get it down to two tables.

One is subjects, where all the subjects are listed containing details of codes, name, restricted entry, content, assessments.

The other one is the student, details, password, current subjects, proposed next years subjects, comments.

This has provided me with a blueprint on what information I can pull out of our SMS, which is all subjects, plus a hell of a lot of errors, there are students doing languages, year 9 courses, Gateway, and all students have form class. It has required some replace development in excel which will possibly need to be moved to being a macro so if i leave someone else can do it.

I don't want it to be complicated,

After a meeting today with a manger, he has said that he is to be involved, which is good, though he keeps asking why we can't develop this in Microsoft Access. I basically told him that noone using access anymore, they are more likely to use php and mySQL. He then went forward to talk about using Filemaker Pro, which now has a web interface. It would be nice to use, however there will be a learning curve which is required to do this. My comment back was why don't we use asp.net, microsoft SQL server installed on a Microsoft Server 2008 running sharepoint. Sorry I had to use something from the meetup last night.

One of the problems that I didn't see coming was that they want to change the way that the information is collected, yes they are doing it online, but in the past they have selected option lines for certain subjects to go into. Now they want the students to select the subjects that they want and then they will let our SMS shuffle it into a timetable that we can use next year. if there are too many clashes they will go back to those students.

I am starting to use a backup of the information kept in my google documents. it seems to be running ok. Though I am starting to wonder if I keep a copy of my .csv or .sql file in there as well as this would be a useful way of managing work from home and home to work as development backups.

Once a student selects a subject there needs to be a check on whether they have taken a subject before or have the required NCEA credits to take the subject. If I was to include this information in the database I feel that I would get lost and have a large problem. To get around this I propose to have boxes come up with the required information that they have to click "yes" or "no", yes means they can move on, no means that the subject will be removed from the selection.

Other problems are the main streamed students that have to take a required course through there provider, do we tag these students? or do they select and have an subject removed at a later stage.

Also required in the project is if they are coming back to school or not, if not what is happening. Possible Career needs also to be entered, this was on the old paper form, it might do well to be included on this.

Access, do we make it available to deans, SLT, other personal so they can see what students are choosing. Other reports would need to be made to help report live what is happening with the classes and selections. If we select a option it gives us who is taking that option.

I think I can do all that is required, though it also need to be able to look professional. If I develop this right there will be opportunity to use css and html.

Do we make this available out on the internet, so parents can get involved in their sons/daughters subject choice?

someelse on the internt is asking if this has been developed before, see http://ask.metafilter.com/83311/Create-a-searchable-online-subject-choice-database

Until next time