This week I have mostly been working on..

I've been interested in the idea of including parents more in A level delivery for some time. This is largely based on the fact that students are very tight lipped about their studies to their parents. I know we are meant to follow a pedagogical approach to learning but the sad fact is that there are significant numbers of students who fail to see the cause and effect of not working now leading to them failing later. Effective parental involvement can lead to better results.

I want to enlist parents by keeping them closely informed of students progress. I've also noticed that in recent years the number of parents with email addresses is almost reaching 100%. The solution was to develop an email newsletter system that can embed individual data sets in each newsletter in graphical format. What this means in essence is that you can embed results graphs for an individual student.

Students can also see how they are progressing, it provides a good way to give students structured feedback on their progress.

An online editor allows you to insert 'merge' fields. The user can choose from a variety of email newsletter templates. Taking the concept further I have also added functionality to embed RSS feeds, Flickr Feeds and Twitter feeds. This means that current content is very easy to add.

Although still in development it's coming together nicely. Currently it uses CSV files uploaded but later it is my intention to link it in to Google spreadsheets. I was also considering adapting it as a Moodle Mod so that it could take data from the Mark Book.

The really cool thing about the charts I embed are that they are generated dynamically in PHP so you don't need to store hundreds of images on your server.