On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Brandon McCaig <bamcc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Rather than worrying about technology, frameworks, peripherals, > and protocols you need to focus on the real problem. Have her > describe exactly what she'll do with it. Try to get her to put it > into context of what she does NOW without the software so that > you can compare. I'm 29 years old so I've been away from school > for a long time. I don't know what teachers are using computers > for these days, but I cannot imagine it being useful to walk > around the classroom with a tablet (if anything I don't think I'd > want my children's teachers having such a distraction). At least, > not so useful as to commission the development of custom > software. I'm also not familiar with what a Montessori teacher > does, but it sounds even less likely that custom software will be > useful since it sounds like the students' learning is much less > organized than in a traditional school. The Montessori philosophy of teaching is quite non-traditional. Two or more different grades of children are taught in the same classroom, usually with just one teacher, who may or may not have any helpers. My wife often does not have help, or, if she does, it has not been as helpful as it might. She has 7th, 8th and 9th graders in her class. This coming school year she will have approximately 20 students. At any moment during the school day, all of the students are NOT doing the same thing. Some may be working in small groups. Others will be doing individual work, where it is quite likely that none of these students are doing the same assignment. Each student often has an individualized learning plan. The initial assessment project is quite needful. In the past my wife has wandered about the classroom assessing her students with either a clipboard in hand or trusting her memory until she got back to her desk and able to write down her assessment notes for each student. Note that students do not get traditional grades. Instead, they have a detailed list of skills that they are working towards mastery in. Her assessments will notate each student's progress towards mastery in light of whatever assignments they might be working on. When it comes time to interact with each student's parents, my wife needs to combine all of this assessment data into a report of the student's progress in each skill area to share with the parents. This is quite burdensome to do entirely by hand. The Montessori method of teaching is most frequently associated with children of age three up through sixth grade. There are relatively few examples of junior high/high school Montessori programs and there does not seem to be a good consensus of how to apply the Montessori methods to secondary education. So the main reasons why my wife does not have detailed requirements for what she would like me to program is that she has been working out what is and is not appropriate on her own. After several years of developing her program, she feels she is at the point where software can be a real help for her. BTW, she is very computer literate. She has done programming before when she was a university student and sporadically since then. So she is well aware of what is possible and what can be useful. I have not given you a good idea of what a Montessori education is all about. If you are curious I encourage you to do the usual online searching. In this thread, I kept it very general on purpose. I was probing this community for their thoughts on two things: 1) Should I make the software web-based or desktop-based? 2) What would be the best way of handling the data involved, particularly the data that impinges on student privacy concerns. As I said in the initial thread, some software would be strictly for the teacher's use. Some would be used by the students and the teacher with the potential that the students might have to access that software in their homes (homework). And finally in addition to the students and teachers, some things might be desirable for the parents to be able to monitor their student's progress from home. And then to make things at least a little more concrete I gave a very broad outline of the first project that she (perhaps foolishly ~(: >) ) hopes to have at the start of her school year. And I have been given some great thoughts by this community to help me on my way! I understand and appreciate your concerns. If the client was anyone but my wife, I would not be attempting this for all of the excellent reasons you gave. But Vonda is kinda the lone ranger here in what she is trying to build, and I think I can give her some real help. And from my perspective it is another opportunity to learn many cool new things and push my limits. I never seem to ever find time to just read and study a Python (or other programming-related) book from beginning to end, but when I have a concrete project to do, then at least I start learning *something* out of sheer necessity. As things develop more concretely and I get puzzled and stumped, I will post more detailed questions. Thanks for your thoughts! -- boB _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor