[Server-devel] school tools

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

I intended to compare some school tools a bit, but IMHO its not really 
needed / useful. I could invest more time in this if you want, but...

Moodle looks like the clear winner to me. Widespread use 
(http://moodle.org/stats/ impressed me), needed features, extentable, i18n, 
good & alive community. (Written in php and mysql|postgresql as backend. 
Martin, I guess moodle runs with suhosin, correct?)

Though the usefulness on the XO without access to a moodle server is in its 
early stages, a client for this is being written or designed. Martin?! :)
Running moodle on the XO itself is not feasible

schooltool (sponsored by the Shuttleworth Foundation) is written in python and 
uses Zope3. And they use rosetta for the translation infrastructure, which I 
consider unfortunate, as it's a non-free tool. But the biggest minus is, the 
community and development seems to be quite dead, basically no mails on their 
lists since 2005, and no new version since then, too. At PyCon in March 2007 
some people added support for LDAP though (on a request from a 
customer/user.)

As I understand it, Centre-SIS and Focus-SIS also provide similar features, 
and provide means for reporting of pupils "performances" (grades, etc), which 
moodle doesnt have. But those features are less useful for little kids, so I 
dont see the benefit here.

Debian-Edu also uses moodle for this purpose.

So moodle, go!?


regards,
	Holger
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