Rationale
Creating a webpage that parents could access and sign themselves up for conference would probably increase the number of parents who attend parent/teacher conferences. The system we have now relies solely on the student to sign their parents up to attend. So, we usually see the "good" students and rarely see the "bad" ones. By having online access to sign up, parents could establish the schedule for themselves without their child or children signing them up during conflicting times. Teachers would be more at ease because they could be prepared for each conference weeks in advanced. Currently, some parents just show up and teachers have to scramble to pull up grades, syllabi, etc. I think this concept would open up the communication lines between teachers and parents, plus allow the administration to have access to how many parents are interested in attending these conferences and which teachers/subjects have a full schedule and which teachers/subjects do not have many parents sign up.
Challenges
This project has been the most challeging project I have ever tackled. It seems that I have spent hours upon hours creating and proofreading code trying to make this grand idea work, but am constantly met with road blocks. I was very excited that a former student of mine had volunteered to show me how mySQL works, so that I could implement it into this project. We spent some time going over database files he had created using mySQL with DreamWeaver and I felt that I could use what he had and "tweak" it into what needed to work for me. I played around with it and read through a nice tutorial site called www.w3schools.com to help me along. After uploading files to our school's web server and testing my form with no success, I found out from our technology coordinator that our current web server does not accept mySQL files. After this disappointment I tried using the FrontPage relational database template. Again, after setting up all of the pages and the database and uploading to our web server nothing worked. I found out that our web server does not like .asp files either. So, after chatting with Dr. Stuve and finding out that my iweb account through Ball State would accept .asp file types I uploaded my pages to it. I spent days just proofing and editting code on my FrontPage pages trying to get everything working, but again no luck. At this point I'm out of ideas. So, I pulled off files from our school's web server that creates a form for teachers to submit work orders to our technology department. I knew these files would work on our web server since that is a form that gets used dozens of times a day. There were twenty four different .html and .cgi files that I had to go through and edit the code to make it do what I wanted it to do. I got the form working and submitting, but I could never get it send a confirmation page to an e-mail address or get the data to store in the database file. My technology coordinator then tells me that the script in that is very difficult to manipulate and work with. I had already came to that conclusion. So, he established space on the server to host my form will allow me to collect the data and send it to me via e-mail without the data being stored in a database.
Design/Technologies Used
This is the point in which I accept defeat and try to work with what I can do off of our web server. I have given up the dream of having a form and database work together to make my wonderful concept work at this point. My hope is that when the high school gets a new web server in January to host Moodle, it will also accept mySQL files so I can create this monster form then. That brings me to my current project. I have created a form that allows parents to sign up for a specific teacher and time for a conference. The results get sent to my e-mail address, I will forward the e-mail to the appropriate teacher, and then parent gets a confirmation page for them to print off that shows the teacher and time of conference. From that I have created an Excel spreadsheet for every department with the corresponding teacher's names and time slots from 1:00 PM to 8:00PM. I have converted each spreadsheet into a .pdf file (click here for an example) so that the parent's can see on the first page of the form the time slots each teacher has available. The issue at this point is how is the spreadsheet going to get updated, then converted to a .pdf file, uploaded to the website on at least a daily basis, and then teacher's having access to their schedule? This is where my students come into play. I have assigned to me nine students throughout the day who help me serve our faculty by providing technology support. They will have to check the stack of conference confirmations every period and update the spreadsheets, convert them to .pdfs, then upload them to the web site for teachers, administrators, students, and parents to view. By giving this task to my students it will help them manage time, meet deadlines, increase proofreading skills, and improve their "webmaster" skills. This will be part of their weekly assessment grade this is based on this checklist.
NETS Standards for Teachers
Throughout this project these are the NET standards that I have personally meet: