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
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