Lori is the sweetest. She showed up at the end of lunch today with a cake to celebrate Kodiak's second birthday. Kodiak went live the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in 2004.

Development continues, of course. I'm currently working on a gradebook and some other goodies.

As for other plans, I've been wondering lately about the feasibility and usefulness of open sourcing Kodiak. It's not mine to give away, of course, as it belongs to the school, but if they went for it, I wonder if it could help other districts.

Rambling thoughts on a Tuesday night regarding what has become, somewhat depressingly, my life's work.

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I've neglected to mention that I've written an article for REALbasic Developer. The editor and publisher, Marc Zeedar, attended my Kodiak session at REAL World a couple months back, and recently asked me if I'd be interested in writing one of the magazine's Postmortem features on my baby bear. Naturally, I jumped at the chance.

If you don't subscribe, now's a good time to do so, unless you don't actually program in REALbasic, in which case you should just plan to buy the next issue.

Here's a brief excerpt from article, and I hope Marc doesn't mind my quoting it here:

But Assessment Tools left me with an additional problem: now I had student data spread across three systems instead of two. The following week, I went to Dave and said, "I think we should build our own system and pull the plug on one of the others." He thought it was an idea worth pursuing, since it seemed it would solve several problems at once: the server crashes, data consolidation, and faculty acceptance. Since this wasn't a decision to be made lightly, we approached Dave's boss, the Assistant Superintendent, and she agreed to talk to the Superintendent to get his thoughts on the matter. He said we could do it, with the understanding that if we failed, he would do nasty things to us.

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Ah, a good day!

Today concluded my pilot run of online testing at Etown. It went swimmingly. This is a strange feeling for me, becuase everything at Etown is typically two or three steps more difficult than it has to be. But this actually went well.

At Etown, we do a lot of testing. Each student takes a pre-test and a post-test in both reading and math. We look at this data in several ways to track and predict student progress. This is a good thing.

However, since 1998 or so, this has all been done with Scantron stuff. Now, don't get me wrong: I like Scantron. My new ES2260 scanner rocks. It's blazing fast. But OMR scanning technology has serious limits. It needs perfect paper. Wrinkle the paper and the test won't scan right. Staple, fold, or clip the paper, and the test won't scan right. Dump coffee on the paper (I received a stack of coffee-stained tests just yesterday, thank-you-very-much) and the test won't scan right.

And when the test won't scan right, that means we're not being as accurate as we could be. Not to mention the huge waste of resources in re-printing tests and copying answers from a bad sheet to a good sheet.

In short, these scan forms are the bane of my existence. Well, ones of the banes of my existence.

So what's the solution? REALbasic and PostgreSQL to the rescue, naturally!

I recently began working on a solution that would allow our students to take their tests on the computer instead of on paper.

As a brief aside here, there was some initial resistance to the idea from some of our elementary folks, who were no doubt well-meaning in their dissent. They were afraid that taking the test on the computer might be too daunting for some of our younger students, who may have trouble reading what's on the screen. This perplexed me, so I asked how they read what's on the paper now. "Oh," someone told me, "they don't take the tests themselves. An aide writes down their answers on the test sheet!" When I suggested that said aide could simply enter these answers directly into the computer, I was met with wide-eyed stares.

At any rate, after a few false starts and some discouraging delays, yesterday was the big day. One brave Middle School math teacher offered to let me use one of her classes as my guinea pigs. And they loved it. As I circulated during the test, one kid looked up at me and said, "This is awesome." Wow.

And the teacher loved that she could see the results in real time. That was a huge plus for her.

Today, as the test wrapped up and the next class began to filter into the room, some of them asked what the computers were for. My guinea pigs replied that they were taking their post test online. "No fair!" shouted the newcomers. "How come we don't get to take our test online?"

I call that a success.

Posted in the section Work | # |

Good news. As of today, I only need to work at Etown for another 22 years before I can retire. I started at Etown eight years ago today: February 23, 1998.

I started as Technology Specialist II. This is a fancy way of saying that I did frontline helpdesk kind of stuff: plugging in printers, restarting computers, and other deskside support.

After a short while, I was asked to whip up a database that we could use to track our tech support requests. That was when I discovered the joy of FileMaker Pro. I took that FileMaker project and ran with it, getting more and more involved in database work.

Then I took on a 4D project which shall remain nameless, which was to revolutionize the way we looked at curriculum. It did not, at least not much. But it did succeed mightily in getting our teachers fired up and pissed off. When Mike came on board in the summer of 2000, he brought with him a far greater knowledge of 4D than I have even now, so I was only too happy to give him that project.

By then, my title had become Assistant Director of Technology, and I was taking care of the servers, routers, and stuff like that, while still trying frantically to keep up with the day to day grind of tech requests. It was beginning to wear quite thin.

In 2001, I attended the FileMaker Developer Conference in Orlando, and I realized that databases were where my interests really were. Over the next couple months, I invested heavily in FileMaker Pro development, only to realize that FileMaker's limitations were no longer something I could work around. I began searching for a better tool.

That was when I discovered REALbasic. I did the tutorial, twice. I did all the sample projects. I read Matt Neuberg's book cover to cover twice. I read REALbasic for Dummies cover to cover. I subscribed to the REALbasic mailing lists and read every message, trying to take it all in.

But I needed a database to work with. I didn't want mySQL, because I have some misgivings about the GPL, and mySQL AB's licensing seemed to be deliberately hard to understand. I couldn't afford to get into any of the commercial players. Then a CD arrived in the mail at work. It was a copy of PostgreSQL, another open source database, with a BSD license. Perfect.

While all of this was developing, Etown was deciding to make student achievement data a higher priority. Mike was ready to step away from the aforementioned 4D project (as well as PowerSchool, which we had also taken on). So when the district decided to hire an official Data Manager, I was able to walk right into the position.

I've shared before here, I think, how the products we were using simply weren't cutting it, especially when it came to looking at achievement data. I was able to fall back on REALbasic and PostgreSQL to save the day in a number of ways.

So in eight years, I've gone from helpdesk grunt to database administrator and programmer. Not bad for an English major who couldn't get a teaching job!

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We spent last weekend in Ocean City, New Jersey, with Jen's family. Her aunt and uncle co-own a beach house on 3rd Street, so just about every year, in the fall, we get a free weekend at the beach. It's a great time to go; there's no one around and even the boardwalk is practically empty. I love it like that, because I hate crowds.

It might have been our last weekend there, though. There was talk of selling the beach house, or even rebuilding, which would take a long time. If they tear down the house and rebuild, they can only build two stories high, as opposed to the three they have now. But if they simply refab, they can stay at three stories. That means they can tear down everything but one wall. As long as one wall is still standing, the building hasn't been demolished and it doesn't count as rebuilding.

I asked what happens if you later replace that one wall. No one knew the answer.

Sometimes, though, it's just easier to rebuild something new from scratch. I'm dealing with something similar at work. We have a program we've been using for years that was supposed to be able to let our teachers view student assessment data. We were just set to roll it out when we discovered that it was giving us completely bogus numbers. There was no obvious error or discernable pattern. They were just wrong.

So late last week I began building an assessment analysis system from scratch. Fortunately, most of the pieces were already in place: our PostgreSQL server, my copy of REALbasic, Corey Redlien's brilliant ChartPart classes. All that remained was putting the pieces together, which I've been doing non-stop ever since, including at the beach.

As of this writing, the pieces are almost together. The bulk of the programming work is done. Most of what remains is moving our existing assessment data from a multitude of Excel spreadsheets into PostgreSQL. But when it's done, hopefully our teachers will have a tool that will meet their needs. And when that moment comes, I'm going to take a well-deserved nap.

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I'm sitting in room 621 of the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center, waiting for PowerSchool University to kick-off.

Fortunately, Jen and Gracie were able to come with me on this trip, which is good, because otherwise, I may have gone insane.

We arrived yesterday afternoon. Gracie was very nervous about the flight, and the 90 minute delay, while we were already sitting in the plane, didn't help. So I missed early registration for PSU and had to come early to register this morning. We checked into the hotel last evening and I discovered, much to my dismay, that they want $10 per day for high speed internet access. Bull crap, say I. I've stayed in two other (much cheaper) hotels this year, and they both provided high speed access for free. Fine, so I'll use the remaining hours on my AOL trial. Oh, wait - the hotel wants to charge you for dial-up, too! Thank goodness PSU itself has high speed wireless. Aaaaahhhh...

We went down to the Navy Pier last night. Very cool place. I'm sure we'll be going back. Gracie loved it.

I decided to wear my black Apple Developer Program t-shirt today, because that always throws people off and then they think I work for Apple. But the PSU people gave us each a t-shirt, color-coded by region and asked us to wear them today. So now I'm wearing my royal blue PowerSchool t-shirt, and I look like the rest of the dinks around here.

PSU provides breakfast and lunch every day as part of the tuition. That's pretty cool. So this morning, I leave my hotel and walk over to the Gleacher center, only to find out that the meals are over at the hotel. Dang. Well, there's always lunch.

Hey, there's Wayne! He did my Object Reports training at the IU back in April.

So, let's see... what else is in my goodie bag? Well, for starters, there's the bag itself. Really nice laptop backback. PowerSchool keychain, one of those mountain climber clip kind of things (hopefully Mike will provide the correct name in the comments). Ticket for a cruise on the Spirit of Chicago. Probably won't be going, though. 10% off my next Apple Store purchase. Nice. 4D propaganda. Ehhh, not interested. I'm really finding 4D to be a major turn-off. There would be an iBook in there for me to borrow for the week, but I declined. I'd rather use my own machine, and they were totally cool about that.

More later.

Posted in the section Work | # |

While your qualifications are noteworthy, I regret to inform you that you are not among the finalists for the position.

I'm thankful for some clarity, finally. Looks like I'm staying at Etown, and I'm happy about it.

I'm part of a really good team. There's Dave, who quite frankly, needs me to look after him and wouldn't be able to function effectively without me. And Mike, who's been a faithful friend and companion since seventh grade (and who also happens to be the best hardware guy around). And Nicole, aka Niner, who will realize tomorrow what I did to get even for the stunt she pulled during the "Change Process" seminar at the IM conference. Not to mention Angry Young Dan, my favorite libertarian, who is now so sneaky that his website can no longer be read by mere mortals. Throw Doris and Brenda into the mix, and you've got yourself quite a crew. A crew that I'm proud to be part of.

I know it's really easy to say stuff like after you've been rejected, but you can ask Dave and Mike - I made my decision before I got canned.

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