[Year 12 IPM] Database software for 2007

Thu Oct 12 19:40:00 EST 2006

i am teaching databases for the first time for my year 11 class as was  
wonering if anyone has any tasks that can assist with teaching them  
the skills. thanks
-- 
Sylvia Pastore
Daily Organiser
Mowbray College
Town Centre
Caroline Springs

Quoting "Potter, Stuart J" <potter.stuart.j at edumail.vic.gov.au>:

>
>
> Donald High School will be using Filemaker Pro, for two of the   
> reasons listed.
>
> - It's easy to learn and easy to use. (good for the students and me too)
> - The school has a fully licenced copy of Filemaker Pro 8.0 (which   
> is a recent version). We used to do our reports on it.
>
> Incidentally we're also a Macintosh school (45 desktops and a couple  
>  of laptops) shared by 165-170 students....although we do have one   
> lab of Macs (20) with Intel chips meaning we can use Windows as well.
>
> Incidentally what programming / scripting  languages are being   
> planned by teachers? Having done very little programming, I'm   
> vacillating between Visual Basic (seems to be a few support   
> materials around) and Javascript or HTML programming (obviously ties  
>  in well with web design and doesn't need any extra software apart   
> from the source code.)
>
> Cheers
>
> Stuart Potter
> IT co-ordinator
> Donald High School
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ipm-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of Mark Kelly
> Sent: Thu 10/12/2006 12:39 PM
> To: Year 12 Information Technology Processing and Management   
> Teachers'Mailing List
> Subject: [Year 12 IPM] Database software for 2007
>
> [7th attempt - our whole school has been blacklisted by SpamCop - and we
> hope we are now off the blacklist!]
>
> Hi all.  Here's a frisky cat to throw among the pigeons.
>
> I'm curious what database management software will people be using for
> ITA Unit 3 Outcome 1 next year?
>
> At the VITTA presentation I did on ITA in August, I recommended that if
> we got organised and agreed on a standard tool we could be much more
> efficient when sharing tutorials, sample tasks, tips and hints, sample
> outcomes etc - all of which will be a big in 2007 as we adjust to the
> new course.
>
> The main DBMS contenders I see are:
>
>
> --- MS Access
> - Access is not a standard part of the average MS Office suite (AFAIK),
> so many kids are unlikely to have it at home, so it would be hard to
> assign homework or practice tasks using it.
> - It costs big money if kids have to buy it for home.
> - It costs big money for non-government schools.
> - For most people, it's not as easy to learn as Filemaker is.
>
>
> --- Filemaker
> - Even fewer kids are likely to have Filemaker at home, so assigning
> home practice would be nearly impossible.
> - It's easy to learn (especially creating programming scripts) and easy
> to use.
> - It costs big money if kids had to buy it for home.
> - It costs big money for schools to buy.
>
> (Having said that, it's the database I use for McKinnon's reporting
> package, and the database I'm most skilled with.)
>
>
> --- OpenOffice.org Base
> - It's FREE for students and schools.
> - It's compatible with MS Access (and can read Access database files)
> - It's pretty much as easy to use as Access.
> - There's some online support for it, but more is coming and we can work
> as a team to develop all we need!
> - Did I mention it's FREE?
> - It comes with other open source replacements for Word, Excel,
> Powerpoint, drawing software etc.
> - It even has its own equivalent of VBA for programming macros.
> - Oh yeah - and it's FREE!
>
>
> --- MySQL
> I only include this because I've heard of one school planning to use it.
>   I would not recommend it because it's far too complex for kids to
> learn from scratch in VCE: too much programming required to get the job
> done.  Way overkill, IMHO.
>
>
>
> If you get some time as the year winds down, how about getting a copy of
> (http://openoffice.org) - it's about 50M to download, and is available
> via WWW and Bittorrent.
>
> Have a play, see what you think.
>
> Cheers
>
> Mark K
>
> --
> Mark Kelly
> Manager - Information Systems
> McKinnon Secondary College
> McKinnon Rd McKinnon 3204, Victoria, Australia
> Direct line / Voicemail: 8520 9085
> School Phone +613 8520 9000  <<< NEW NUMBER
> School Fax +613 95789253
>
> IPM Lecture notes: http://vceit.com
> Moderator: IPM Mailing List
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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