Learning Stuff About Stuff

Isn't assessment supposed to support learning from 3-18 in Curriculum for Excellence? How do we square that with a system that has all S4-S6 pupils abandoning any pretence of learning from Easter until the beginning of June in order to prepare for and sit the SQA exams? I don't see anything in the documentation about the senior phase that suggests that anyone is planning to deviate from this age-old model of qualification by exam. Nor do I have any alternatives to offer! That is all.

FreeMIS is an Open Source, web based, school management information system which I developed in the mid noughties. A lot of people arrive at my blog looking for information about FreeMIS. If that's you, this post should provide you with an up-to-date picture of FreeMIS. FreeMIS is working for me at North Berwick High School, providing the following functions: reporting to parents; positive referrals; progress tracking and target setting; unexpected absence notifications. FreeMIS is easy to use once it has been set up, but it is a fairly technical job to get FreeMIS up and running on a web server, and there is not much documentation to help you. As a bare minimum, you would need to know how to get a Ruby on Rails application running on a web server (FreeMIS runs on Rails 1.2.2), be familiar with MySQL and be able to use a tool like Phpmyadmin to populate pupil tables (as FreeMIS does not have a front end tool to enter new pupils other than by doing it one at a time!) If you can m