[Pro] Could this type of idea ever be possible...

Freeway
1

Hi,

could this ever happen in our time…

Let’s say I had a website whose individual pages were each for my students. In other words, each student had their own page… ex www.WEBSITENAME/JohnAbrahms.htm

could this happen… where when I make a change to that student’s page, it automatically notified someone (i.e. the parent) that a change was made to just that page. Then the parent (who already had the URL) could just go to the page and see the changes.

Barry

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2

This is all possible Barry, even notifications by email or even SMS but this is not something you can just do with actions nor is it simple in that it would take some work, I would see it with an admin control area which you would access for adding and removing students, setting the page access etc. This is something that you could do using PHP and MySQL along a third party service for the SMS side if you wanted SMS messages. I did a property web site ‘years ago now’ that used to alert people by SMS, it was simple to integrate with the web site using several lines of PHP, the service had a monthly charge and then a per message charge but you could just alert parents by email if preferred.

You would need to learn PHP and how to use it with a database such as MySQL, the database would store information such as student names, parent names and contact methods and numbers etc. It will be a daunting challenge for someone that knew nothing of PHP or working with databases but not an impossible thing to achieve for your first PHP / MySQL project, you just need quite a lot of time, a hell of a lot of patience and a good book like ‘PHP and MySQL Web Development’.

HTH

On Feb 24, 2013, at 7:32 AM, Barry Hoffman wrote:

Hi,

could this ever happen in our time…

Let’s say I had a website whose individual pages were each for my students. In other words, each student had their own page… ex www.WEBSITENAME/JohnAbrahms.htm

could this happen… where when I make a change to that student’s page, it automatically notified someone (i.e. the parent) that a change was made to just that page. Then the parent (who already had the URL) could just go to the page and see the changes.

Barry

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3

On Feb 24, 2013, at 7:32 AM, Barry Hoffman wrote:

could this ever happen in our time…

Let’s say I had a website whose individual pages were each for my
students. In other words, each student had their own page… ex
www.WEBSITENAME/JohnAbrahms.htm where when I make a change to that
student’s page, it automatically notified someone (i.e. the parent)
that a change was made to just that page. Then the parent (who
already had the URL) could just go to the page and see the changes.

If the pages are to be updated through the website by submitting a
form then this is quite easy. If you’re thinking of it being updated
by uploading a replacement page then it’s a lot more difficult and in
most cases impossible. You would need to have a monitor running
regularly.

David

–
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
email@hidden
www.ivdcs.co.uk

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4

doing it with a form should not be a problem… but just me making a change to form will send email out??

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5

Yes, because the application running on the server will be receiving that form request, interpreting it, and can act on that change. (Update the database, send an e-mail, ping Twilio over their API to send an SMS…)

Your pages would be virtual – there would not be a file named JohnAbrahms.html – rather, there would be a front controller (a PHP or another scripting language application) that would accept all requests for pages that didn’t really exist and interpret their name and pass along that information. For example, you might have a URL like this:

http://example.com/homework/2013-02-25/physics

The front controller looks at that, knows that there isn’t such a page in the filesystem, and translates the request to something like this:

controller: homework.php
week: 2013-02-25
class: physics

homework.php looks up the homework for physics next week from the database and generates a completely synthetic page to show your student.

So this is all very fancy and sci-fi, right? Well it requires several things from you in exchange. First, your pages will have to share a template. So you will need to have all homework pages look pretty much identical, with their content being primarily text (since databases find that to be the easiest thing to store). Second, you won’t touch Freeway once you have set something like this up, rather you will use your browser and a private admin control panel to add new content or administer old content. So, in addition to you needing to carve up your content into repeatable blocks that the system can assemble, you will also need to create the tools to administer that content.

Walter

On Feb 24, 2013, at 8:23 AM, Barry Hoffman wrote:

doing it with a form should not be a problem… but just me making a change to form will send email out??

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6

Well, I am very impressed by the responses; obviously they are quite advanced in nature.

I can respond to a couple of things (from Walt)

  1. I actually would want the 50 student pages to share the same template. It would not be a hw thing, what it would be would be something that showed their grades and things would get added to each kid’s page at different times… So if there was a table template than that would be great for all kids.

If I wanted to add a score of 80 for example in student A then I would need just student’s A’s parents to get an email that their page is updated and then they can go check it.

  1. I do not need a single graphic at all. All HTML text is ideal.

If the data changes (the scores) are not added in FW, how are they done?

tx,

barry

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7

The data about each student is stored in a database, and you update that database. Usually, that’s done in an admin page that you also write.

A relational database like MySQL allows you a great deal of flexibility here – you generally only ever have to enter a given piece of data once, rather than duplicating it in a bunch of different places. You might have a set of tables like this:

students
	id
	first_name
	last_name
	email
	guardian_1_name
	guardian_1_email
	guardian_2_name
	guardian_2_email
	guardian_3_name
	guardian_3_email
	created_at
	updated_at

grades
	assignment_name
	student_id
	grade
	created_on

These tables are related through the students.id = grades.student_id relationship. In Rails parlance, the Student is said to has_many grades, and the Grade is said to belongs_to student. This means you don’t need to have an infinite number of properties for grades within a student record – a student can have many different grades, and you can present an average of them or individual results, depending on what your template needs.

These examples also show another thing: in a ‘normalized’ set of tables, I would have a third table called guardians, and rather than having three slots per student for guardians, I might have something like this:

guardians
	id
	student_id
	name
	phone_1
	phone_2
	email

You can take this to ridiculous extremes, adding a table for emails, another for phone numbers, all in the name of honoring the Single Responsibility Principle. You get to choose how complex to make this, though, and the database and your code will sort it out in the end anyway. You always trade flexibility for clarity in any case.

Walter

On Feb 24, 2013, at 10:13 AM, Barry Hoffman wrote:

If the data changes (the scores) are not added in FW, how are they done?

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8

Walt,

see your email-

seems like so much is needed just for a “notification.” the editing of the data is a 1 second thing in a FW page since i have it open all the time anyway.

Just telling the parents they have a change to their page thru an emil could be done by me going to email and just sending them notification.

I need something between the complex process and the one I just mentioned.

Barry

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9

Left out some important things here:

students
	id
	first_name
	last_name
	email
	guardian_1_name
	guardian_1_email
	guardian_2_name
	guardian_2_email
	guardian_3_name
	guardian_3_email
	created_at
	updated_at

assignments
	id
	name
	due_on

grades
	id
	assignment_id
	student_id
	grade
	created_on

That’s a more proper combination of things – there are many assignments, and many grades for each assignment, related to a student. A student may have more than one grade for a single assignment – maybe a test was taken over. One of the many benefits to this sort of setup is the flexibility in reporting it allows you. Want to look at a single assignment, and see a list of all students who completed it? Want to look at a student and see a list of all assignments and their grades? You can pivot the data any which-way and see what you want to see.

Walter

On Feb 24, 2013, at 10:44 AM, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

students
id
first_name
last_name
email
guardian_1_name
guardian_1_email
guardian_2_name
guardian_2_email
guardian_3_name
guardian_3_email
created_at
updated_at

grades
assignment_name
student_id
grade
created_on

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10

Walt- very deep, however, just thought I should point out, I am not setting up a grade book of any kind. Just an informational page about their child… no math calculations needed (my personalized Excel that I created does it all).

looking for

-I update their personal page for their child

-they know about it by email and go take a looksy.

As simple as this sounds, there is nothing of its kind right now happening like this that I know of and the benefits to a parent would be like a dream.

We already have things at school but take a read…

-there are progress reports (takes 5 weeks)
-there are report cards (another 5 weeks)
-there are emails (time consuming)
-there are calls to parents (yuck! but have to do it when I have to)

This idea would keep them in the loop and since I could write anything on the page I could include comments etc.

sorry it may not be as involved but still not sure how to proceed.

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11

Yes you could. I am proposing something that has a lot more utility than what you describe, though. Maybe more than you need, too! My kids’ schools use Pearson PowerSchool, which is a powerful grade reporting framework initially developed by Apple. There is an open-source equivalent called Moodle that you might want to check out as well. The benefit to systems like these is that you don’t have to maintain a fragile HTML document, there’s a “paper” trail of all assignments and all grades and all students, and you can look back through history and see when and where something happened. You’re not responsible for maintaining those reports separately, either. You just enter assignments, record grades, and the system handles the rest. Privacy is ensured by unique logins for each parent and each student, and nobody can see anything they shouldn’t, just by guessing the proper URL based on a student’s name. (There are serious legal handcuffs on any sharing of private information related to a minor, in most states of the US.)

Walter

On Feb 24, 2013, at 10:51 AM, Barry Hoffman wrote:

Just telling the parents they have a change to their page thru an emil could be done by me going to email and just sending them notification.

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12

Yes Walt, I am aware of those programs and had an idea about the security thing…

Those programs do a lot for teachers like keep all the records, allow parents to access etc.- but notification- I doubt it.

I have all the grade records in excel from every student of every year. What I have set up in Excel is so dynamic I would never trade it.

Right now, the parents email me a “Grade request.” and I copy and past their child’s specifics from Excel (created to hide other students info) into a .pdf and send to them as an attachment- it works for now.

My idea was to replace this and let them have a “place of their own” for their child.

  1. it would terminate at year end, and the URL would be unguessable because it could be something like

Hoffkids.com/TimmyRodgers30947304397593793

The uRL does not matter, the PARENTS have the link in their email

I could get to security latter and do password protect if I had to on each.

I think we are starting to get more on the same page though…

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