Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Chiara Friso, Valentina Lenarduzzi, Davide Taibi and Davide Tosi
The digital class roll provides a lot of advantages such as the possibility of:
Cataloging data year by year or month by month following specific criteria defined by the teacher;
Filling-in the class roll outside the school schedule;
Updating or modifying data in case of typos or compilation errors immediately;
Saving data quickly and searching information by keywords or by specific filtering criteria;
Customizing the area of the class roll, for example differentiating the area for marks from the one
for didactical activities.
Currently, the reference closed-source tool for digital class rolls in Italy is the Silente Registro
Elettronico (URL: http://silente.trendcom.it/) developed by TrendCom and sponsored by MIUR. Silente
is a SaaS (Software as a Service) tool that provides abilities for managing class rolls and registers in
a digital way, for monitoring school activities, and informing students, parents and teachers about
students’ absences, marks, advices, and meetings. Unfortunately, Silente costs 900,00 euros for the
version limited to 5 classes (with a renewal subscription of 250,00 euros per year) or 2800,00 euros
for the version without restrictions (with a renewal subscription of 600,00 euros per year). These
prices can have a real impact on the financial budget of the Italian public schools, thus pushing OSS
developers into developing equivalent OSS solutions.
Table 1: Description of the primary set of projects and experiences on OSS adoptions
1) Project Name: Cinema at School (URL: www.g-raffa.eu/Cinema_a_Scuola)
Description: the project started in 2006 to make one-reelers and short films in the primary school starting from
the storyline, production, and also post-production. All the phases have been implemented using open source
software solutions and the films are released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5 Italia license.
Objectives: in addition to didactical and educational objectives, the project aims at make aware students and
parents about the potentialities offered by free and open source software solutions.
Solutions: the project does not implement and develop new solutions or software but exploits the Operating
System GNU/Linux Ubuntu, Luciole (http://festival.inattendu.org/Luciole-Linux) and Stopmotion
(http://stopmotion.bjoernen.com/) to create animation movies, CinelerraCV (http://cinelerra.org/) for video
editing, and ZYnAddSubFX (http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/), Rosegarden (www.rosegardenmusic.com/)
and Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) for audio editing.
Methodology: the project is based on a well-defined methodology that describes all the activities and phases
of the project, thus simplifying the reproducibility of the experience. The main phases are: identification of
Open Source Software solutions able to support video/audio pre- and post-production; hardware and
computers adaptation to support complex and resource-consuming operations; teachers training about these
software solutions.
Schools Involved: Scuola Primaria "Marconi" di Roncaglia (prof. Raffaella Traniello)
2) Project Name: Zoomlinux (URL: http://sodilinux.itd.cnr.it/zoomlinux)
Description: the project started in 2008 for the development of a suite of didactical tools for partially sighted
school-boys and girls. The suite has been developed by the CNR Technological Institute for Didactic.
Objectives: develop an accessible suite of tools that can simplify the school integration of partially sighted
school-boys/girls
Solutions: the Zoomlinux suite, the documentation that supports teachers in installing and using the suite, and
a collection of didactical flyers to introduce teachers to the problem of partially sighted and blind school-boy
and girl
Methodology: the project is a research and development project supported by CNR and AICA. The two
partners followed a rigorous methodology to achieve the goals of the project: definition of the project
requirements in cooperation with teachers, students and parents; development of the suite; extensive
experimentation of the suite with the ONLUS “D. Chiossone”.
Schools Involved : AICA and the ONLUS “Istituto per ciechi D. Chiossone"
3) Project Name: Wii4dida (URL: www.wiild.it)
Description: the project started in 2010 for integrating the Linux-based Wiimote Digital Blackboard with
traditional didactical methodologies. The project is supported by the Innovation, Research and ICT Department
of the Provincia Autonoma di Trento.
Objectives: exploit the potentialities of digital blackboards, with open source technologies and software, in
primary and high-level schools
Solutions: the WiiLD digital blackboard is a hardware platform that integrates a Wiimote with a PC to provide
digital blackboard features. During the project, a lot of OSS tools, which support teachers and school
managers, have been experimented and developed with WiiLD (e.g., python-whiteboard, Ardesia, Jarnal, Vue,
Geogebra, Wxmaxima, Solfege).
Methodology: the project is a research and development project supported by several schools, the Research
and ICT Department of the Provincia Autonoma di Trento and the University of Trento. The partners followed a
rigorous methodology to achieve the goals of the project: identify the didactical role of WiiLD; experiment
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