Corrective Actions System

An Explanation

Corrective Actions System is not a teaching tool, rather it provides support for teachers and administrators to keep track of students and their associated corrective actions. In essence, the CA System is part of a discipline management system.

A Solution to a Need

Our school used a confusing, paper based discipline management system. The administration voiced an interest in going to a web based system that would track student detentions, suspensions, and other consequences. They wanted something protected from the public, but available to teachers and administrators.

As a solution, I coded a functional CA System using PHP as the programming language and MySQL database for storing the data. Teachers would login to the system and contribute their referrals. They then could print out detention forms or simply track different corrective actions that might work best for the student.

ScreenShot

Reflections

The Corrective Action System was a program I designed for the objective of learning PHP. It was a wonderful, frustrating, and challenging project. Teachers, and especially administrators, found the system to be most helpful in keeping track of student discipline. In fact, the project was popular enough to be referred to additional schools and school districts.

There are definite areas that need improvement. Despite the built in password protection, I’m still nervous about security. The system is accessible via the internet. Ideally, it would run on a school’s intranet. Also, I would like to continue to customize different aspects of the system but need to expand my knowledge of PHP.

Fortunately, the project was designed using open source resources. I’ve a number of fellow teachers (who enjoy programming as a hobby) who’ve contacted me with the desire of working on the system as a group effort. Perhaps it will become my first open source group project!