Project History

2000

SchoolTool was conceived in Cape Town by Mark Shuttleworth, and The Shuttleworth Foundation hired a team of developers and systems analysts to work on the project.

2002

The development team, using a Java platform and client/server design, created a pre-alpha platform. Mark terminated the project as it was distracting more and more resources from the core focus of the Foundation, and appeared not to be headed in the envisaged direction.

2003

SchoolTool was reborn, using the Python programming language. Mark decided to cut the code himself, trying to recreate the good old garage days when he could spend all day working on the code that ultimately became his first startup, Thawte. However, as he wrote: “It took me (two months) to realise that times have changed - life’s too good these days. Try as I might I don’t have the self-discipline to shut out the rest of the world when the phone keeps ringing, email keeps flooding in (although I did learn to ignore most of that, a useful exercise) and there are limitless opportunities to do fun stuff. I quite enjoy life as a retired cosmonaut with some financial security, but that enjoyment comes at the expense of focus.”

Mark subsequently hired a leading developer in the Zope community, Steve Alexander, and the firm Programmers of Vilnius to manage the design of SchoolTool’s core architecture, based on Python and the Zope Object Database. In the 4th quarter, they completed three milestone releases of the core SchoolTool server and a wxPython desktop client.

2004

Providence, Rhode Island-based teacher and developer Tom Hoffman succeeded Steve Alexander as SchoolTool project manager. Etria LLP was added to the SchoolTool development team.

In the fall of 2004, the development team developed an XHTML web interface as the primary user interface for SchoolTool. The team also began to move SchoolTool onto the now stable Zope 3 platform.

SchoolBell was conceived as a separate product that would package SchoolTool’s calendaring functionality for non-school organizations.

SchoolTool milestones 4, 5 and 6, as well as SchoolTool and SchoolBell 0.7 and 0.8 were released during 2004.

At this time Mark apparently regained the focus he lamented losing in 2003 and launched Canonical Ltd. and Ubuntu Linux, which quickly became the most popular desktop Linux distribution in the world.

2005

The spring of 2005 saw, at long last, the first production releases of software by the SchoolTool project. SchoolBell 1.0 was released on March 15, 2005 as a general purpose shared calendar server. SchoolTool 0.11 was released in August 2005 and was tested and used in several schools around the world.

During the summer of 2005, the Center for Innovative Communities and Arlington County Public Schools (Va., USA) adopted SchoolTool as the basis of CanDo, a competency tracking system for use at career centers around the state. Long time teacher and open source advocate Jeff Elkner coordinated the project, with students Paul Carduner and Eldar Omuraliev writing code. In the fall of 2005, CanDo was deployed for testing and use at the Arlington Career Center and other sites around Virginia.

Project manager Tom Hoffman spread the word about SchoolTool with presentations in the US and Europe, including at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, PyCon, the Northeast Linux Symposium, the National Educational Computing Conference, T+L2, (all in the US) and the II Congreso de Software Libre in Valencia, Spain, the First International Conference on Open Source Systems in Genoa, Italy, EuroPython (presented by Albertas Agejevas), and Open Source for Education in Europe in Heerlen, The Netherlands.

Also in 2005, Canonical released Edubuntu, a version of Ubuntu Linux specifically aimed at schools, which includes SchoolTool, and LaunchPad, a set of tools for open source development, which are used by SchoolTool.

2006

2006 was a tricky year for the project, trying to move from a calendar-oriented application to the much more complex suite of applications that make up a student information system. Our aim was to beta test this suite in several schools around the world. Unfortunately we did not achieve that goal, and in analyzing the weaknesses of our development process, decided to proceed with more narrowly focused partnerships in Lithuania and Belgium, with local developers working closely with specific schools to complete, deploy and test SchoolTool through the first half of 2007.

2007

The basic changes in process we made in 2007 were effective. Development moved forward much more steadily and consistently than in previous years and more closely aligned with the immediate needs of schools. Local funding of active CanDo development boosted our base of developers and testers, addressing our most pressing constraints. Our school/developer relationship in Brussels did not work out, at more of a cost of time than money.

Running code was tested or used in production for our major components:

• Demographics: Ignas wrote a simpler demographics package to meet the needs of the Vilnius Lyceum and CanDo. It was used at both sites.
• Gradebook: Alan Elkner picked up development of the gradebook module Stephan Richter started in 2006. The CanDo competency-based gradebook was also used in production at the Arlington Career Academy.
• Attendance: Ignas implemented a “journal” attendance and grading application for the Vilnius Lyceum, which allows teachers to enter a grade for each meeting of the class or mark and absence. This became the standard SchoolTool attendance system.
• Calendaring: The calendaring code was cleaned up and improved with input from CanDo and testing at Vilnius Lyceum.

2008

SchoolTool core – We successfully released a beta for SchoolTool 1.0 on schedule in October, our primary goal for the year. It included the core components of a student information system, plus calendaring. This had the desired effect, a significant increase in queries, feedback and bug reports from around the world.

CanDo – CanDo finally merged completely with the improved SchoolTool web interface. 2007’s developer internships paid off with a strong core of student developers, led by Filip Sufitchi. An 8000 student, multi-school production CanDo server was successfully deployed in the fall and is saw significant use and enthusiastic feedback from teachers and administrators. The year was capped off by an RFP by the state of Virginia for a $40,000, eight district CanDo pilot.

SLA Intervention System – Principal Chris Lehmann and the staff at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia worked with Alan Elkner to create and deploy a student intervention tracking system which has worked well for them and attracted immediate interest in a larger pilot by district administration.