Greetings from Providence

Hi!

I'm technology coordinator of Feinstein High School, a public school in 
Providence, RI (http://feinsteinhs.org).  We've been using Zope since I 
started at the school two years ago.  I tried jumping into CMF last 
year, but it was more than we could handle--more customization was 
necessary than I could manage.

We moved to Plone about four months ago.  That's gone much more 
smoothly.  I had a small staff of students actively updating news, etc. 
for about a month, but I lost them to other responsibilities, so there 
isn't a lot of action on the site right now.  The teachers and students 
aren't currently posting their own data either--so to be fair we aren't 
really taking advantage of more than a fraction of Plone's 
capabilities.  I there are some UI changes that I think are necessary 
(based on my experience trying to train teachers to use the CMF last 
year), and everyone's attention is focused on things other than the 
website right now, so I can't really do the amount of training that 
would be necessary at the moment.

We also use Zope for our assessment system, which has rather unique 
needs, as we don't use grades but evaluate students strictly on 
progress toward performance standards.  I've gone through several 
iterations with that--first with ZClasses, then Python products, then 
an ultimately failed experiment with Parsed XML docs.  I'm currently 
working on migrating to an RDF-based system using a Mozilla app as a 
front end, but I'm still pretty early in that research.

I will be at OSCOM, and I have already booked a Plone in Schools BOF 
for Thursday at 5:15 in John Harvard's Brew House.  Perhaps I will see 
a few of you there.

Tom Hoffman
http://tuttlesvc.org



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