Team Paper, and Project Proposal: The Road Ahead

The team has been hard at work in terms of figuring and executing the task at hand. We have been trying to figure out all the details in terms of what the database will be consist of. Our project proposal, Team Papers, and our other crucial assignments are completed for the fall Semester. Right now, we already know what means we will use to conduct our project. The Peck School already has the entire Microsoft Office Suite, which is nice and cost effective for our purposes. Now the only thing will lie in having to learn how to use Access. There are various resources available on the internet like YouTube and other streaming video sites which offer many tutorials. Our team looking ahead plans on looking and learning from them.

Team Meeting Thursday/Friday December 8/9th

The team met to work on the paper. When we met on Dec 5th we also assigned parts of the paper to each member.

-Kelsey: proposal and project variables

-Charly: PECK and their needs

-Eleni: PECK's key goals and objectives, addressing sustainability issue, and added value to PECK

-Seyi: project execution: what plan to do, timeline, what we need

On Friday we met to edit, finalize, and submit the paper.

Team Meeting Monday December 5th

The team met to finish the slides for the presentation, edit them, and practice what we were saying. We gave each other input on what to say during each part of the presentation. Later that day we made a Google Doc to the presentation script. The slides were not created to be too wordy or overwhelming, so to make sure we said everything necessary during the presentation, Eleni suggested we make a script and practice key points. This way we could give each other suggestion on what to add/delete.

Team Meeting Sunday December 4th

The team met to outline the Presentation we had on Tuesday December 6th about out project Proposal.

assignments for slides and talking during presentation:

-Eleni does community service pedagogy and info on Holyoke and PECK

-Charly does timeline

-Kelsey does value of project

-Seyi does specific about project: Access vs Drupel

Meeting with Prof. Gal: Access Info

Thursday December 1, 2011

-Access is capable of what we want it to do (to date)

-need to know: number of questions

number of options

what types of comments

responses in number scale, box, or drop-down menu

can limit text characters if want

-questions: need to set up formula to calculate a numbers or is Hyry inputing numbers?

what if wifi in school is down?

-when testing form, need to make sure can complete it in 10 minutes

-ipad affects how you test the form and length if description (don't want lengthy text because screen is smaller than on a laptop

-need more specific and detail to move forward in making the form with Prof. Gal!

Meeting with Prof. Brewer: Drupal Info

Wednesday November 30, 2011:

We met with Professor Brewer today to learn more about Drupal, another option to make the form in. He told us:

-t's web-based

-dependable - the White House uses it!

-can have pop-up menus, multiple choice, blank spaces

-can looks at survey results as a table and as analysis

-can get report statistics

-could generate a pdf of the report

-can add additional comments at end of survey (but not after each question)

-multiple views of data results

-Webform can generate e-mails

-could write a custom app for ipad, but difficult (need maintenance)

Cons:

-each teacher would have to set up an account in order to see the survey results for their in-class reviews (some less tech-savvy teachers may need to learn how to use website)

-have to build in security from ground up

-needs upkeep - maintain and support it over time

-Drupal needs to be at hosting service to be useful

-need certain things on computer to install Drupal

Looking Up Access

Monday November 28, 2011 Team meeting:

Our group met today to start investigating our options for what program we are going to build the form/survey in. Today, we focused on Microsoft Access. We started playing around with Access (since none of us know how to use) and figure out how to make a form. Eleni followed this process to make a mock-form: go to Faculty database; create form using Form Wizard; Justifies format; choose necessary fields; go the bottom right of screen, click on Design View (last) button, and click edit items - edit drop-down items, edit title of field. Colomnour View also looked nice. We also started looking up Access features to see what it has to offer (did not look too much into this).

Working on our Presenation

Today we all brought together our ideas, and slides for our presentation today. We had all worked on specific delegated roles that each of us would present on. Our idea is that we would all equally present our roles for the team, as well as our objectives, and primarily ideas moving forward.

We all worked using Google Documents to put together our PowerPoint. We were able to agree on color coordination, and the overall appearance of our presentation during the meeting as well too.

So far we are optimistic and expecting good things with how everything is coming along.

Meeting with Megan

Today, we met with Megan from the Peck School. She and the other administrator had many ideas that they wanted to work with. Most of their ideas were just a culmination of many brainstormed ideas.

The administration has wants to work towards tracking the progress of the students. They want a more efficient way of looking at the progress of each individual student, and they are looking for software that can chart a student's progress on a 40 point scale. Charly also talked about this previously when he met up with Megan earlier in the week, but she emphasized the need for this at today's meeting.

They also talked about how projects in previous years have been implemented a data base, and suggested that we could perhaps improve what is currently there.

But the project that seems to have the most priority is one which allows for the principal to evaluate his teachers more efficiently. The administration is looking for a streamlined way of evaluating how teachers are meeting objectives, engaging the students, checking the understanding of the students, and improving reading comprehension.

The administration is looking for a system that can evaluate how teachers are meeting the above objectives with a standard template of the principal comments, to effectively, and quickly evaluate teachers, so the principal can spend more time in each of the classrooms, and as well as meeting the goals of the full service school. The Administrators stated that they would be open towards buying an electronic device (ie, IPAD, Kindle, Nook, ect....) that can achieve the task for the administration.

Agenda for 11/15

Tomorrow we are going to meet up with the Peck School in Holyoke to start our project. We will contact her and get the ball rolling as well as learning more about the needs of the school. But for today we are looking to delegate rolls for the team, as well as deciding what we are planning on saying to Megan tomorrow.

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