Welcome to my website! If you're here, you're either interested in one of the projects that I'm hosting here: FabLMS, DiCMS, or DiCMS-Blogger. Else you've followed some rabbit weird hole that ended you here. No judgements. 

I started this website originally as a way to host a project that I've been wanting to develop, the Formative Assessment-Based Learning Management System, of FabLMS for short. This project is to be an Open Source (GPLv2) Learning Management System that schools could use to run all their information systems. Now, there are already quite a few LMS out there, such as Blackbaud, Power School, Moodle, Canvas, and so many, many more. It is a multi-billion dollar industry that, in my opinion, lack a lot of the tools needed to actually run a school and actually leverage the technology for better learning. It also happens that I actually built an LMS that ran the school I currently worked at that actually did more than any of these current LMS did and did it better because it was actually tailored to what schools needed.  My system was built before the LMS market existed, hell it was built before non-paid PHP frameworks existed (I'm looking at you ZEN framework), so I had to build my own framework, with my own version of controllers. The software ran the school for about 10 years until we were forced to "upgrade" to something else, but I've always thought about building what I had in a newer, more robust framework. Thus this project was born, which is done in my own time, aside from my work.

If you're interested in more information about why I started FabLMS, read my first blog post.

Formative Assessment-Based Learning

The first LMS I developed, named the Learning Tool (LT), relied heavily on idea that teachers should prefer Formal Assessment over Summative Assessment, with the tool created to help facilitate this. The LT was created with this idea in mind, and offered the student up-to-date grades and assignment comments, as well as revisions, online documents, and collaborative learning environments. This was done well before Google and their excellent suite was there to write and share documents. Teachers also had more ways than ever to communicate with their students and parents. All communication was made to involve all stakeholders, instead of the fragmented communications that exists now.

One of the most important features of this system was the idea that we were using student-created artifacts to assess skills in students. We called these skills Scope and Sequence, and the system guided the teachers to think of what they were trying to teach rather than simply creating an assignment. I wrote up a little about this on one of my blog posts.

Beyond Assessment, Infrastructure

While the assessment piece was about 50% of what the LT used to do, the other half was dedicated to tools to help the school run. There are very few systems that can take the schedule of classes and integrate them into a room reservation system that was used by the admin and facilities to schedule maintenance. It all integrated with the ticketing system that let teachers enter room requests, parents enter IT requests, and students combination of each.

There was a transcript system and a progress report system that focused more on what skills the students were acquiring than simple grades. Gradebooks were teacher-friendly while still pushing them to utilize rubrics and allowing teachers to grade on skills.  There was a fundraising system that tracked donor and donations, there was a alert system that tracked student progress and notified students, teachers, parents and deans about the need to connect with the student.

And It Should Have More!

I've built more systems in the school that I work with to interface with existing systems and build out what is lacking. I currently run my own checkin/checkout system that syncs all students and parents and can read driver licenses and check them for red flags. These things should be standards in all modern LMS.

Instead we see more focus on making things look pretty for the student and teachers and parents. Now, I like pretty, but there needs to be more focus on better ways of teaching and learning than there is now. More substance over style.  I hope to build a system that, while it may not be too pretty, it actually integrates all the functions needed for a school to run in a single package.

Also, I'm not above using other services. I plan to integrate external documents, be it Google Docs, or Office or anything else. I would like to give users the flexibility of using other software to manage other parts of their system. Teachers want to use Google Classroom? They should be able to and it should integrate. The only thing I'm not willing to compromise on in assessment.

So, if you're interested in the nonsense I'm spewing, feel free to look around. You can read my development blog to get some insight on what I'm doing philosophically. or you can login to the system using any of the accounts below:

• staff@kalinec.net, password: staff
  
• faculty@kalinec.net, password: faculty
  
• student@kalinec.net, password: student
  
• parent@kalinec.net, password: parent
  
• coach@kalinec.net, password: coach