My wife (a Montessori teacher of 7th through 9th grades) is trying to coerce me to create some helpful software for her classroom. She has lots of things she *wants*: Some involve only her and her record keeping. Some will involve both her and students. Some would additionally involve parents. With the parents it would have to be web-based. For students, some software would be used only in their classroom. Others would be used both in and outside the classroom. In my wife's case, she would want to be able to access the software and its data either at school or at home. Currently she does most of her work on a laptop that she carries back and forth between home and school. Anything involving student records would have to be kept secure.
For her most urgent project to be done before school starts in 5 weeks (!), she wants me to enable her to assess her students' work as she wanders about the classroom using this Samsung Slate tablet the school has given her to use. This device would be okay for stuff like checking check boxes, navigating menus, radio buttons, drop-down list boxes, etc., but would be horrible for any type of manual data entry. So she would need to do the latter at her laptop, though she might do limited data entry on the tablet. I do own server space and a domain name that I have never used, but should be adequate for my wife's needs. The school has a wireless network that allows Internet access, which is usually (but not always!) reliable. The main question: How do I best handle the storage and access of my wife's classroom data in these three different scenarios (wife's access only; wife and student's access; wife's, student's and parent's), and have each party to have access to relevant software I create? Using this *most urgent* project as a starting example, this student assessment software would involve only my wife, the tablet and her laptop. Both the laptop and the tablet would have to both be able to run the software and have synchronized data between the two devices. If the student data resided only on these two devices, then protecting the student data isn't as much of an issue as long as my wife controls her physical devices. However, if the data were to reside on a server then that would become a more important issue. It would obviously be very important that data cannot be lost. I can easily imagine my wife dropping and destroying the tablet, the tablet's hard drive crashing, the laptop's crashing, etc. If the data were stored online, then possible school wireless network outages would be a potential bad problem. My best thoughts at the moment are to: 1) Find a way to always keep the laptop and tablet synchronized. 2) Have both devices write a backup copy of the data to the server whenever a change in the data occurs. 3) In case of wireless network failure, the software would realize this and know that whenever connectivity is restored to write any data that has changed in the interim. 4) The backup data on the server would have to be securely encrypted against whatever hackers might try to to access or intercept the data. (Hmm. What about the communications between the laptop and the tablet?) Is this a sensible way of approaching at least this one project? Of course, I have not a clue as to how to do any of this (yet!). As always, many thanks in advance! P.S.: My wife has researched existing software and has found everything lacking. She wants custom solutions to her custom needs. Oh, joy. But very interesting! -- boB _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
