Open Admin is an open source web based software tool for schools. It’s basically an open source school administration program. This can be very helpful for schools in saving money and time to have their own custom system built for them. Since schools are always looking for cheaper, and more effective tools Open Admin is perfect. I think we should be spending much less for software in schools and much more on the actual education of our students. Open source software like Open Admin is perfect for that! Here are the features as listed on their website:
- Demographics - It stores student and family information that can be viewed and printed in a variety of ways. The student demographics are extensible; you can add your own additional fields to store important information about students in your school(s). This is made possible by the use of templating in several functions.
- Attendance - Attendance can be entered either by secretaries in the school office or by teachers in the classroom. It features the ability to do different numbers of periods per day for elementary grades vs high school and middle years. This will allow elementary classes to have 2 classes per day (AM/PM) with a homeroom teacher while higher grades can have attendance done on a per subject period basis (and be subject based). Attendance reports are integrated with report cards/progress reports. A variety of attendance reports are available. A variety of attendance entry methods are available for use by teachers and/or secretaries to allow it to integrate with normal school practice.
- Discipline - A simple discipline module to track student discipline events and track outcomes, etc. Behaviours may be categorized and statistical reports may be printed.
- Report Card System - a flexible reporting system with per subject objectives (up to 20), integrated attendance reporting, etc. All report cards are printed as PDF reports and may include a school logo. All subjects may have unlimited length text comments, and can have any desired ordering. Attendance reporting will now do days open, days enrolled, days absent, and times late as standard.
- Online Gradebook to allow teachers to enter marks and assessments onine from school or home. It can group and weight assessment items and post directly into the report card system. Students and parents may view these results, if desired. It can also post directly into the report card system.
- A Transcript System to print student transcripts, including GPA calculations and full support for student progress on the transcript (which are also PDF based for excellent print quality).
- A Fees System (along with Lunch program) to allow charging of student fees, printing of invoices, payments, invoices and export summary transactions to external accounting programs.
- Parent/Student Viewing scripts to allow parents to view attendance, gradebook(where allowed), and report card marks. This is easily integrated into existing school sites.
- IEP (Special Needs) Site that is integrated at the division level that allows special needs teachers to tailor individual student programs that can be viewed from each school’s teacher site. This includes the ability to add student medical history, testing done, student teams (and responsibilities), and objectives chosen from lists of thousands, categorized in a variety of ways. There can be up to 32 objectives per subject and each ’subject’ is specific to that particular child. His/her program would consist of a variety of subjects in areas such as fine motor control, etc.This system can generate progress reports (for use with the report card system) as well as a comprehensive IEP report containing the yearly plan for the child. This IEP can also viewed from the teacher site, to ensure compliance throughout the year.
- Export/Import Modules - to allow students to easily transfer schools within divisions without re-entry of demographic information. Export of data to other programs. Export of data to Provincial authorities via an automated XML based transfer mechanism.
- Saskatchewan SDS support for direct XML transfers of student demographic, subject and enrollment marks to provincial authorities.
- An Online Daybook to allow teachers to plan and view their lessons/days. Currently, only a very rudimentary function.
- Upcoming: A Single site SSL installation to allow a school to run OA securely on a single website.
That’s everything you need in a School Administration Program. Create awareness about this tool to the schools around you. Our schools are spending too much right now for software and textbooks. And our kids in these public schools are not getting enough teacher/student time. Click here to learn more about this open source project.
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August 19th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Thank you very much and keep up the good work!