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Electro - Thanks for suggesting Midas. I'll check it out. Unfortunately, if it's not free or Open-Source, my ability to use it will be severly limited. Our college uses Blackboard right now, but I find it extremely weak in several areas. Mainly in the interface, though. The backend is solid. If the front-end provided better usability, I wouldn't be worried about anything.
Here's what I find iritating about Blackboard:
1 - There is no way to quickly enter in assignments. The system displays a separate screen from the Gradebook view to enter details about an assignment. That would be only a minor annoyance if the programmers would at least provide a "Save and Create New" button. On my Access system, I have the ability to create new assignments from the same screen that I enter in all of the other information about a class. It's very fast and efficient.
2 - There's not way to duplicate an assignment. This would have come in very handy for me last night as I was creating a new class. Most of my assignments' descriptions are the same, and they all have very similar requirements. It would have gone a lot faster if I could have simply hit a "copy" button after creating the first assignment.
Those are my two main gripes, I guess. Over all, it's not unworkable, and I'll use this solution for now. There are other apps who's Windows-based solutions are better than in Linux, anyway, so I'm not quite ready to give up entirely on Windows. So if nothing else, I'll still be able to track grades. There's also the old-fashioned "Pen and Paper" method, too.
Evilmonkey - Yeah, Base just isn't quite there, yet. I have played with it, but even the OOo 2.0 version doesn't have anywhere near the functionality that Access has. Maybe someday. But even then, I'm still locked into a specific platform. Granted, Base is far easier to acquire, but I'd really like to have a front-end that uses something that everyone already gets no matter what OS they run. A PHP/MySQL solution would provide that very nicely. I appreciate your suggestion, though.
Well there are some utilities to convert an access database to mySQL, although you would still need to create a front end for it.. so I guess those scripts won't help a whole lot unless you decide to comit to wrinting your own front end in PHP or whatever...
Basically what I am looking for is an app for my own use, not a server or web-based system, which is what seems to be out there. The features a typical teacher would need:
1) record attendance (radio buttons defaulting to "present" would be changed to "absent", "late", "excused")
2) calculate student grades allowing for different grading schemes: "total points", "weighted by category" (i.e. quizzes = 20%, tests=40% etc.)
3) print scholarship reports/stats for: students (i.e. little Johnny got a 30 because he missed homework #1-35), classes (class averages, std dev, number of failures, number of students with final scores between 0-64,65-70, etc.) assignments/tests (how many people failed the third exam?)
import/export is not necessary for my purposes. I guess I'll be spending my summer putting together something like this in php/mysql...
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