The data management piece is really the easiest part of the equation. Where it begins to get fun and interesting is in what other types of teacher professional development can be supported once you have your data management in place. Aside from freeing up administrative time/overhead in running the system, and making PD/room assignment/etc info more available to your faculty, the move to a system that is truly web-accessible then creates additional opportunities for people to interact and collaborate around their professional endeavors. A system based in Drupal could, for example, support action research in the classroom as part of TPD, all within the same system.
In addition, you should also be looking at interoperability and freedom from system lock-in. Simply being able to display something on the web (as FM/Access/ColdFusion all do) isn't enough; getting data in (in the form of external resources, rss feeds, etc) and being able to move data out (as csv, doc, html, rss, rdf, robust support for web services) are also critical, as about the only thing you can really guarantee about data is that, at some point, you will need to move it to another system.
Finally, you should look at ownership costs, and what your outlay really gets you. No matter what system you choose, you will need to pay something to make it do exactly what you need it to do. How many users can it support? What are the yearly licensing fees? How likely is an upgrade to a new version to break your existing solution? The choice is less between free and proprietary, and more about getting a tool that allows you to meet your need today, and grow into the needs/wants that you then discover.
Cheers,
Bill
--- On Fri, 8/8/08, Deirdre Harrison <deirdreaharrison@gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Deirdre Harrison <deirdreaharrison@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Teacher Databases
> To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
> Date: Friday, August 8, 2008, 1:15 PM
> InResonance also has these advantages as it is based on
> Filemaker Pro too.
> Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
>
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