Friday, December 10, 2010

SchoolTool on Fedora, in Nepal

Abhishek Singh at OLE Nepal:

In our continual effort of improving our systems and providing tools to support digital education, we were presented with a new requirement — providing schools a software based tool for classroom management and grading. After evaluating a few available tools, we encountered SchoolTool which was the foremost candidate meeting most of our criteria:

  • Web based
  • Different user levels: admins, teachers, students
  • Student information system
  • Calendars
  • Attendance
  • Grading
  • Localizable
  • Open Source

Though being the right candidate, SchoolTool had a few of the shortcomings for us — the tools is readily available (as a set of installable package) for Ubuntu only and had a lot of dependencies. As our plan to integrate the tool in the NEXS (School Server software based on Fedora Linux) infrastructure, a lot of packaging work had to be done...

Now we are ready to pilot SchoolTool (localized in Nepali) in a few of the OLPC deployed schools.

We have built binary RPM packages for Fedora 13 and Fedora 9, for both 32 and 64 bit architectures. Additionally to encourage developers to test their own builds and to contribute in porting the tool to Fedora based distributions, we have made the packaging sources available under non-restrictive license. If you would like to test my builds, the RPM repository is hosted at http://ftp.schooltool.org/rpms/.

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