Create a Kindergarten class in eZ Publish

Online searching found too many choices for grade books-grading systems at higher levels. Little or nothing online specifically for kindergarten. For instance, can the child tie their own shoes? While logically that is yes/no, there is gray area. And it is about as important to know when in the school year this happened as it is to know whether or not they can do it in order to gauge their rate of development.

Categories of skills

• --Emotional and Social
• --Readiness for Math
• --Reading readiness
• --Other Developmental skills
• --Parent Responsibility

Within each of these categories, several testable skills, line by line.

The idea is to make this available in real time for reference use by teacher, principle, and parents. The rate of development at this age can be so rapid that quarterly assessments may be too wide a reference window. Each time a skill is assessed, it is nice to have a record. But relating that record to other skills of that child and the skills of that child to the general overall development of the class is a paperwork nightmare.

Ideally, the information regarding each skill for each child should be immediately available. Jackie can tie shoes? September 10, not yet tested, October 5, tested received N grade because could not. November 10, tested received A grade because could easily tie shoes. That was the goal more than a quarterly grading system.

The system in place was a two sided sheet listing each skill beclow the top level categories, with 4 blanks to the right, one for each quarter.

Start by copying an eZ Class.

In this case the Documentation class was chosen as the base class to build upon. Primarily because of the simplicity of that class. Admin->Setup->Classes->Content, and existing content classes display in the bottom pane. Clicking the "Copy" icon to the right of the "Documentation page" line create a "Copy of Documentation page" class.

Change "Copy of Documentation page" to "K_Grading_System, change "title" to "student_name". The "student_name" must be identical characters in the "Object name pattern" and "identifier" boxes. This is how eZ knows which field to use for the display name of the object in a the final html output.

From there, the entire class is put together using text lines for skill categories, the matrix datatype for each skill tested, and text blocks for the final comments section. As simple as selecting either text line, matrix, or text block type from the drop down list of choices and clicking the "Add attribute" button in other words.

The end result looks like this:

Eliminating paperwork and real time accessibility is achieved. Added benefit is that the results of each skill test is immediately available following testing, and the eZ versioning system time stamps the date the result is entered or changed, with time stamping all the way back to the original version. Access restrictions, pdf printing, all the other document management/publishing capabilities are built in.

In this case, the class was protoyped and thoroughly tested on an intranet system. Moving the class to an internet accessible system on a completely different server was as simple as a few button clicks using the eZ Package creation system. More about sharing classes..