Arthur S. Alexion on Fri, 20 Sep 2002 16:50:14 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] k12 grading software


On Saturday 14 September 2002 03:42 pm, Sean Finney wrote:
> sorry i don't have anything to add as far as helping out, but could
> you let the list know if you decide on one?  my mom is an elementary
> school teacher, and knowing this would help greatly in my evil
> plans to convert her to the bird...


> 
Finally got to a point where I can respond meaningfully.  I've 
installed three programs, and tested them for performance and 
stability.  My wife, the teacher, has not passed on their functionality 
yet.

ggradebook
Looks great so far.  Can be complied for gnome or just GTK+.  I 
compiled it to use Gnome, but it runs fast under KDE as well.  
Extremely spare on documentation, but intuitive to use.  So far, my 
only gripe is that there is no documentation on adding reports, nor on 
the binary data file format.
http://www.gnu.org/software/ggradebook/ggradebook.html

XML-Java Grades
Very slow to load and slow to run.  Not very mature in features, but it 
does have a nice tree view of students, their tasks and grades.  Runs 
in Win or Lin.  I installed it on a windows partition and tested it 
under both.  Best feature is the XML based data storage, and XSLT 
reports.  Lots of room for user customization.
http://carol.wins.uva.nl/~zegerh/grades/

OpenGrade
The most mature product and the most feature rich "out of the box".  It 
is Perl based.  Comes with an install script that checks your system 
and downloads, installs and configures any Perl modules that it needs 
but you don't have.  The program can be run from a terminal or as a 
Perl-tk GUI.  It can be run on any OS that supports Perl.  I installed 
it in the windows partition, but did not test it there as I do not have 
the windows Perl stuff installed.  Best documentation, too, including 
some documentation of the data file format (which I don't find very 
easy to understand myself, just looking at it).  Author helped me with 
some install problems that I had.  His responsiveness is a plus.
http://www.lightandmatter.com/ogr/ogr.html

If you are still interested, I'll post my wife's preferences as a 
teacher/user.
-- 

_______________________________
Art Alexion
Arthur S. Alexion LLC
mailto:arthur@alexion.com
http://www.alexion.com

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