Opensource Software for School Management System

SchoolTool: An Advanced School Management and Information System

SchoolTool is an Open Source, free, web based student information system designed for schools around the world. It is developed and distributed by Shuttleworth foundation with strong support for translation, localization and automated deployment and updates via the Ubuntu Linux installer and package management system.

SchoolTool is licensed under GPL2 and written in Python using the Zope 3 framework. The main goals of this project are to create a simple turnkey student management and information system, including demographics, gradebook, attendance, calendaring and reporting for primary and secondary schools.

Features

- Customizable student and teacher demographics and other personal data

- Contact management for teachers, students, and their guardians

- Teacher grade books

- School wide assessment data collection and report card generation

- Class attendance and daily participation grades

- Calendars for the school, groups, individuals, and resource booking

- Tracking and management of student interventions

Install SchoolTool

The core development team of SchoolTool strongly suggests and recommends to install it on Ubuntu 12.04 or later. Since they have created packages for multiple operating systems, the core development team doesn’t support them.

SchoolTool is found in the official repositories, so we can install it with command:

$ sudo apt-get install schooltool

However, SchoolTool has a PPA to get the newer releases and development releases.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:schooltool-owners/ppa

Or

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:schooltool-owners/dev

Update the sources list using command:

And finally install SchoolTool using command:

$ sudo apt-get install schooltool

Access SchoolTool

Open up your browser and type http://localhost:7080/ in the address bar. If you want to open it from a remote client, edit file /etc/schooltool/standard/paste.ini,

$ sudo nano /etc/schooltool/standard/paste.ini

Set the host value as 0.0.0.0 as shown below.

host = 0.0.0.0

Save and close the file. Restart schooltool service.

$ sudo service schooltool restart

Now you can access the SchoolTool web console using URL http://ip-address:7080 from your browser. You will see a blank calender screen like below.

Initial Configuration

Change Management password:

The default SchoolTool administrative user is “manager” and password is “schooltool”. Login using the above credentials.

Go to the Home button on the upper side. Click on the Password under the Settings section. Enter the old and new password twice and click Apply.

Server Settings:

Log in to the manager account. In the Server section, you will find the details of your SchoolTool server.

Setup Outgoing Mail

SchoolTool doesn’t act an email server like Sendmail or Postfix. It will send mails like email clients such as Thunderbird, Evolution.

To enable mail function in SchoolTool, login to manager account and go to Server tab. Click on the Outgoing Email link. After that, Click on the yellow colored pencil icon to change the email settings. Fill up the smtp, Email and password details and click apply.

To verify the mail settings, click on Send Test Email under Actions menu and enter the test mail contents.

Setup Calendar

It is important to setup the calendar as per your Regional location. To do that, click on the Calendar tab on the Server section. Select your Time zone, for me it’s Asia/Kolkatta

Go to the rest of the links such as Errors, Tabs and Pack Database. Mos of them are self-explanatory. Read and change the settings as per your needs.

Setup School

Here we’ve come to the brief and biggest part that needs more time and attention to get things done. We can’t cover all the things in one article. So i recommend you to visit the official documentation page of the SchoolTool, go through the sections one by one and setup your school accordingly. It will take some hours or even days to setup the whole school setup. Don’t be afraid, it is not that a difficult task. SchoolTool team has a well prepared self-helf documentation with screenshots in their website. You don’t have to go anywhere to learn SchoolTool. Learn from the SchoolTool documentation page and do it yourself.

References:  SchoolTool Website