Artzt Project Gallery

Rails application – tinySIS

The Nova Project is a 300-student public alternative high school in Seattle School District. In Spring of 2006, as part of my culminating project for my Master’s in Education at UW, I worked with Nova staff to understand Nova’s status reporting requirements. They use qualitative evaluations and work within state alternative learning guidelines that require learning plans for each student and monthly status checks on student progress.

I was investigating how to replace their paper-based processes with some kind of web-based solution, either using Seattle School district offerings or our own. After giving up on the district, I implemented tinySIS (or Tiny as it is known at Nova) using Ruby on Rails. The system has been live at Nova since Fall 2006 and is used daily by the Nova staff.

Tiny tracks progress for all of Nova’s students and allows Nova staff quick access to student status data. Staff members record status reports about classes and independent study contracts. These reports are then summarized by homeroom, or “coor” teachers, who produce an overall monthly status report for the student. Using Tiny, staff members can define the requirements and credit goals for a learning experience and then track student progress against those goals.

Using the credit reporting system in tinySIS, homeroom teachers map Nova credits to district requirements for the transcript. To read more about tinySIS and how it fits within Nova’s unique culture, click here: http://nova.tinysis.org/school/about. You can also read my culminating project paper here.

Note: The screens above show a live Nova database but with fictionalized student names. Contact me if you’re interested in looking at the system.

Rails site update - Digital Learning Commons

The Digital Learning Commons wanted to update their Bookmarks application to add simple page editing. Educators use this application to compile lists of web resources for teaching and learning. I developed an Ajax-based user interface for creating and editing simple home pages combining headings, text, bookmarks, and links to category pages and other user-generated pages within the Bookmarks site. During this project I also updated the application from Rails 1.1 to Rails 2.0. As with many of my clients, I worked with their in-house designer, who finalized the CSS.

Joomla site - Church of the Resurrection

Church of the Resurrection is a sweet little Episcopal church in the Lake Hills neighborhood of Bellevue. I had deployed a Rails based website there a couple years ago, but they wanted some updates like an online calendar and the ability to easily upload and show PDFs. I decided to switch the site over to Joomla. It was interesting to create a Joomla site. Joomla has a nice admin interface and is reasonably flexible. The templating system is straightforward, and it’s easy to create modules, or content extensions. One thing I don’t like about Joomla is its table-heavy layouts. Tables pretty much pervade everything.

It’s always interesting working with really non-technical people, smart in a different way from computers, and finding solutions that work well for them. I created a little Joomla module to deal with the PDF uploads. I was surprised to find out that there was no simple module that would scan the files in a folder and create reasonable links to them. They had been maintaining their monthly calendars in paper form using Publisher. I convinced their office administrator to transition to Google calendars, which were easier to maintain, obviously, and allowed public access on the website (here). I love Google calendars.

Personal website - McArtzt.com

McKelvey-Artzt-Land is a Typo blog. I have a love/hate relationship with Typo. But the setup I created makes it relatively easy to post baby pictures hosted on Flickr. I love Typo because it is a fairly simple Rails app and I can fix things and extend it. I dislike Typo because it is flaky.