Guest Post: Ben Chapman’s week of code

Posted by Eamon in PHP, Zend Framework, community, echolibre, industry, leadership
Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 17:42

This post is by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who is with us for a week on work experience.

Hello! The guys here at echolibre thought that making a web app would be the best way for me to experience working in this industry, so I am. The idea that I’ve come up with and started this week is, as Eamon put it, a document management system for schools, teachers & students.  Here’s just a quick overview of what I want to do with the project and I’d love to hear what you think about it or any ideas you have — so if you want to, just throw me a comment below!

Basically, the idea is to have a platform that enables those who participate in a school environment to share resources much more easily and to make it easier to find the relevant resources faster. Included in this would be a “homework journal” style system to allow the student to see exactly what they have to do and allow them to organise it more efficiently and with almost one-click access to very relevant resources chosen by the teacher to go along with that work.

This is a largish project and I don’t expect to get everything done in the week, however, my aims for the end of the week are:

The core of the application, which consists of:

• Login for school administrators, teachers and a single class based login.
• Linking and creation (uploading images, documents, PDFs etc..) of resources for teachers.
• The ability to see class assignments for students using the single class based login.

What I hope to do with the app in near future:

• Student logins so that students are presented with a fully customised dashboard that allows them to display everything that they have to do in their “homework journal”.
• Parent logins so that parents can review the student’s progress easily.
• (a slightly more distant near future I would love to see) a “marketplace” where teachers could swap resources they have created for free or for a fee.

I have yet to think of a name for this product, so I’d really love to hear any ideas people would have on that.

David and Eamon have given me advice from a technical and project / commercial perspective.

I’m using Zend Framework in the LAMP stack. I’ll update later in the week with progress.

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