A School with Messages

A lot of major features are rolled out on this release, each containing a lot of sub-features.  Let's go over the changes.

Fill In Information

The idea behind this was to add more information to the existing pages out there, or at least to start to. The big release here are schedules! They're all self-contained in a Blade Component that can be placed anywhere, passed some classes and it will show you a nice little schedule.

This is now added to teachers, students and rooms. More work will be done on this widget at a later time, adding iCal, RSS, etc.  Making this also led to the development of School Settings (available through the staff@kalinec.net account). Through here we can start defining some school wide settings. To start off, you can define how many days and which days are in your school week and what your hour of operations are.  There is also a Name Field definition. 

The Name Field definition is a way for admins to provide how names should be formatted according to primary role (Student, Employee and Parent). Since we can now also add role fields, you can specify one of those to use as a name generator. For example, you can add a "title" field to your employees, populate the data and set the name field for all employees to be their title and last name, thus ensuring all your teachers are known by their Mr./Ms. LastName only. As a default (and because I don't want to write titles in), I made all kids go by their preferred/first name and last name, all parents by their full name, and all employees by the gender neutral "Mx."

Student Class Enrollment and the Class Scheduler

I decided not to pursue this one. Basically, the idea that has to happen in order for the Student Class Enroller to work is that we have to have a system where we can create a set of requirements for classrooms. This means that it should be defined somewhere how many years a students needs to take of each subject. Once that is done, then the re needs to be a system that lets students choose electives they would like. Only then would I have enough data for the system to work correctly. As I'm not there yet, I decided not to focus on this.

However, the general class enrollment system was upgraded!  Now, whenever a staff member enrolls or unenrolls students through the General Class Enroller, a message is sent through web sockets announcing those changes. If another staff member is also using the General Class Enroller and viewing a class where changes where made, They will get their view updated with the new data and receive a visual alert that changes to enrollment were done by someone else.

Homepages

There is now something there! Well, for students and teachers only, but it's a start. Whenever a student or a teacher logs in (you can try this using student@newroads.org / faculty@newroads.org accounts) they will see a small widget with all the classes they they're teaching/taking. The classes are clickable and will take you to the class management page (more on that below). 

Along with the homepages the messaging system is now integrated through the site. The messaging system is an implementation of web sockets using Laravel Reverb and Echo. The foundation of the system is built and class announcements are implemented. Essentially, broadcasting and notifications are enabled so that a system can emit a notification to other users through Laravel Reverb. Users on the site will be using Echo to listen for these notifications and if they receive one they will create a Toast announcing the message. There is a new hidden menu as well for notifications. Whenever a user gets a notification the menu will pop up with the notification and the ability to click to go to it.  As of now Class Alerts will send notifications about class-related alerts.

Class Management

The largest update was this one, the ability for teachers to manage their classes and students to interact with the class material.  I thought about how to approach this for quite a bit before settling into this answer. My biggest struggle is that I know that, no matter what I build, there will be better class management solutions out there. Google Class, for all it's flaws, is great at class management. It allows the teacher to post things in novel ways, it offers amazing connectivity to Google and the way that they can do online submissions is great. Now, they suck at assessing, they're horrible at school management (which seeks to manage a school, not just the classroom), there are no standards for progress, and no robust backend to keep grades and history in a well organized fashion. Regardless, teachers want to use their classroom management because how good and easy it is to present and disseminate information to their classes.

So I knew that, no matter what I built, teachers will want to use something shinier, newer and something that I, as a single coder, could never build. Besides, while I think that class management is really important, teachers must given control on how to present materials, this is what makes them good teachers. We still want them to assess in a productive manner, and we still want them to fill out the correct reports and paper work, but we should leave the actual teaching of the class, the presentation of materials, and the class "flow" completely up to the teacher. 

My solution is to leave class management as wide open as possible, so that people can come in and use a different class management system, but build in the assessment system, since that is what we really want out of the classes.  This almost means that I shouldn't actually build a class management tool, but that thought is also wrong, since there will be many schools who will be looking for a solution that does this already and are not interested in integrating something else. The solution was simple, all class management happens through a single Livewire component that is responsible for all of it.

In this design decision, I'm allowing the maintainer of the software to use or develop their own class management system if they like. They can make on that is just an iframe to google class, or anything in between. The system simply expects a Livewire Component to be provided via the config. As a developer, they can then create whatever widget they need.  This also allows me to build my own component, with what I think is the bare minimum teachers need to manage a class. Currently , this only includes class announcements and class links, but I plan to expand this using widgets that teachers can drag into their class manager. The only restriction that I will be imposing is that the actual assessments of the student work must be assessed through my system.

Let's Talk About Assessment

Assessment is the biggest driver for this Learning Management System, specifically Formative Assessment. So let's define what they are first.

Formative Assessment - The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments

Summative Assessment - The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.

Summative assessment in schools is what most people are familiar with. You learn stuff, you take a test and that determines if you learned or not. If you did, you pass if you didn't you don't. It work as expected, as a measuring tool to see if the student has learned the material or not. The biggest issue with this is that it does not promote learning. What I mean is that it only really promotes learning to take the test. There is no demonstration that the student has gotten anything substantive out of it, only that the student knows how to pass this test. In fact, no matter what teachers might say, passing a test does not mean that you've learned the material, only that you've learned enough to regurgitate the answers in an exam. It provides no insight on what the student knows.

Formative Assessment, on the other hand, seeks to constantly assess what the student knows and does not know, with the ideal that we can then supplement what the student does not know in order to teach them better. Formative Assessment has always been a goal of education, but one we can't really seem to be able to grasp. It makes sense as to why though, it is very hard to be able to discern what the student is lacking based on artifact produced by them that are assessed and then discarded to go to the next topic. Formative Assessment needs to happen constantly in order to be useful, and decisions need to me implemented as soon as any weaknesses are found in student's learning.

As teachers, we try to do this to the best of our ability; We give homework for the students to get comfortable with the material, we hold classes hoping to answer students' questions and we try to hand back assessments with explanations of what they got what they got. But we're simply not good at it. A lot of it has to do with the massive amount of information required to process, another has to do with with the actual  feedback we give back. Most students will simply take the paper that they were assessed in, look at the score and move on, even if that score is functionally meaningless.

The Parable of the Two English Students

I made this up back in the day, but it's what driven mainly to try to attempt to build this system. Suppose you have two English student taking the same class and assigned the same paper to write. Now, one student is great at mechanics, his paper flows correctly, transitions words are on point, and the paper is well written but boring. It has no imagination, it is clear the student simply got the basic information, threw it in paper and made it sound good.  This student gets a B, with maybe a comment saying great job! but something more!.

Next we have this other student. He's not good with mechanics and grammar, his vocabulary is basic, but he writes with a passion. His words are fun to read and it comes across that the writer is passionate about this topic. We can't give this student an A, since the mechanics are pretty bad, so we give them a B.  We now have two different students with completely different papers with their own strengths and weaknesses but they have the same assessment. Now, most teachers will include a note to the student about their work and corrections on what they did wrong, and all students will pretty much ignore it, see their grade, internalize it and move on. This is why a lot of the students will get a a string of "bad" grades and then internalize that "they're not good at math".

The "assessment" that we provided in the last example is meaningless. It doesn't tell the student what they did right and what they did wrong, it offers no specific feedback that will point blank tell the student what they did right and what they did wrong. As a consequence, they take the whole grade and "assign" that grade to their perception of how they are as a person in relation to that subject. Get too many bad notes in math? I'm bad at math, get some good grades in history? I'm a history genius.  Both of these conclusions are erroneous; The fact is that students are strong on certain things, but weak on others. The goal is to strengthen their weakness and nurture their strengths, but that is impossible without meaningful feedback detailing what those weaknesses and individual follow up with each student.

In this example, there is no further strengthening after they have their papers back. If they did bad enough, there may be a way to "make it up", but that is summative assessment, since the teacher will move on to the next topic regardless of what the student may be lacking. The ideal response in this case would be not to assess the homework directly, but rather to use the homework to assess strengths and weaknesses and present the assessment not just as a simple grade, but rather a list of assessment categories that the student can see at a glace what they did right and what they did wrong.  Then the teacher could follow-up, based on that assessment, with other assignments that are tailored to students to strengthen their weaknesses.

Demonstrating Learning

I have seen galaxies die. I have watched atoms dance. But until I had the dark behind the eyes, I didn't know the death from the dance. And we were wrong. When you pour water into a jug, it becomes jug-shaped and it is not the same water anymore.

- Terry Pratchet, The Thief of Time

Words matter. When we call assignment "homework" or even assignments what are we telling our students? We name things and throw them at our students, but the words that we use, just like water, is not the same once the students takes it in and make those words their own. They become the jug, and the water that you give them is not the same water. When you hear the word "homework" a student sees it as busy work, something that is work that they have to  do. There's nothing inherently good about work, here no learning that necessarily takes place during work, work are just task that you do for the business to thrive, it has nothing to do with education, yet we use these word with students and assume that they will internalize that this is for their own good. But do they? or do they see homework as just nothing but BS that the teachers give you to keep you busy.

As educators, we see it differently. We see it as practice for the material we are teaching. We see it as a way to assess the whole classroom on weaknesses and strengths. We know that if the whole class messed up on a question then we need to go over the idea behind the question to find out what they didn't get.  We use it as a "soft" formative assessment, but we don't really follow up or differentiative much. If we see that maybe most of the class had problems with addition, we might teach an extra class on it, then give more homework to reinforce the material. This leads to all the students who already understand the material to be more frustrated, as they're now expected to do more work at home even through they know it. It also harms the students who don't get it, as they might understand parts of it, but not other, meaning that one student may need to practice the basics, while other students need to work on "borrowing".

Why do we have homework? Well it is a form of assessment and a form of practice. But really, what we should be using homework for is to demonstrate the learning of material. There is no way to really know what a student knows. There's no way to really know what another human knows, or how they see things, or whether they understand what they've been taught. We've all had students that nod their heads and act as if everything is clear, only to massively fail on their first exam.  So, as teachers, we need a way for students to demonstrate that they're learning the material. This is what "homework", "assignments", "quizzes" and "tests" are, a way for a student to demonstrate what they know and what they don't know. Only when we have a demonstration of a student's capabilities are we able to make an informed decision on what learning should take place for that student.

As educators, our goal is to create artifacts that, when assessed, will demonstrate what the student has learned. These artifact, of course, should be used to assess multiple skills at once, since we always want to be assessing old material, in case they forgot or didn't grasp it correctly. They also need to be clear as to what exactly they're made to demonstrate. Finally, we should not be assessing the artifact directly, rather we should be using the artifact to assess the skills that we're trying to get the student to demonstrate.  Then end result of this demonstration shouldn't be a single grade, it should instead be a collection of assessment of skills. The student should get a report with skills that they've "leveled up" and skill that "needs work". Also, classes should not be getting a single grade (although it will eventually need to, since the education system requires single grades), but it should be a list that the student knows ahead of time of all the skills that they will be learning in this class, and a "dashboard" that gives them their current status on each skill.

In a sense, this leverages gamification, which has been proven to be very powerful, with education in hopes of driving the student to not see "homework", but "Learning Demonstrations" that they can use to "up" their skills so that they can "pass the level" (pass the class).

Building a House

The last section took me about 2 weeks to write. I have way more to say but I'm not as good a writer as I am a coder, and I haven't coded in close to month, so it's time to wrap this up. I will continue to talk about my assessment plans but I also want to get other things done. Going back to the house analogy, the foundation is built, the assessment piece will be the main living room of the house. It will be large, take a lot of decoration, and will be the place where most people will be using day-to-day, but the rest of the house is needed.

So I will be splitting my coding time into two sections: assessment and "other rooms". The assessment piece is so big that it will take a large chunk of development. As such, I will be building it piecemeal. For this development cycle I plan on working on two features. I will start the assessment piece by defining "standards" or "skill" that will be expected to be taught in classes. I will try to get data from existing educational standards and use them as a "Scope & Sequence" for my classes. The idea will be that all teachers and student will be able to see what they class should cover by scraping the standards and transforming them into skill.

The second feature that I will be working is a self-contained feature that I plan to be done with I'm currently debating which feature I would like to add on, although I'm leaning towards the communication piece. The communication piece will be part of the class management but separate, as it is not something that you will be able to turn off. Rather, it will be used on a per-class basis as a communication tool between the teacher, student and parents. This tool was used with great success at my original school, and I haven't seen something quite like it. The idea is that all class conversation should include the parent by default.

This might not take that much, so I'm also considering creating the ID system, which is a way to display student ids through the website, allow them to add them to their wallets and start to provide a method to "check-in" people.  Will update when done.