CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello everyone, this is my first post here. Hopefully this is the proper place for such a thread. I was recently hired by the Illinois Action for Children non-profit to configure an out of the box install of CiviCRM 4 on Drupal 7 to assist pre-school teachers to record and report classroom attendance.

Being an absolute beginner, I was sent to a 2 day training course in Chicago which has given me a decent grasp of the basic functions. The instructors recommended utilizing these forums (along with IRC and wiki documentation), so I wanted to see if this is a topic I might be able to find further guidance on.

After searching these forums, Google, and Lobo's blog, I am aware there was/is an interest in using CiviCRM for handling school related projects such as online admission forms or registration for parent teacher conferences. Most posts I've found about these issues are from 2009 and 2010, though. Does anyone know if any big developments have been made in this area?

I'm also wondering if anybody could take a look at the goals of my project, and either make suggestions or point me in the direction of others who may have already developed better strategies for such a project. Because currently I'm unsure whether I should be using custom activities, events, smart groups, tags, or what the best way to start this is. Everything I've thought of/tried seems way too tedious and makes me wonder if this is even feasible, but I assume I'm missing something.

Primary Goals:

-To provide each teacher with a list of students in each of their classes that will allow them to quickly record attendance on each day of class.
-Provide attendance reporting for Illinois State Board of Education and Early Learning management.

Secondary Goals:

-Create a communication forum for teachers including: News, Reference materials, Blogs, a wiki.
-Create an education and organizing tool for parents of students

Challenges:

-Create an interface in CiviCRM that is quick and easy for teachers to use.
-Create effective ways to set up classes and maintain class lists.
-Create custom reporting for Managers, Administrators and ISBE.

User Roles:

-Teachers
-Managers
-Administrators

Entities:

-Students
-Classes
-Classroom sites
-Teachers
-Class Sessions (one class on one day)
-Student Attendance (one student attending one class on one day)
-Managers
-Parents (?)

I know I'm in over my head, so any help is appreciated.

Wow, thank you very much for sharing that. As I said, I'm completely new to this, and hadn't heard of Organic Groups and their integration with CiviCRM. This gives me a whole new insight on how to potentially move forward, even if it's not 100% clear yet how I might include daily attendance taking.

I will also look further into Lobo's CiviSchool and see where that takes me. Again, I really appreciate the response.